Niklas: Hi and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you are joining me for a chat with Ben. Today we are diving into the world of solo founders, builders, communities, and the future of independent creation. My guest is a man on a mission to connect 1 million builders by 2050. And we are seeing it on the hoodie, I think, already. Your current project is builders.to. How did that start and where are you at?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, so we started off in November, I believe. ⁓ Right now we have about 40,000 page views, so we're doing pretty decent there. Excuse me, member signups are about 600 or so members. And I think in the last, let me check the dashboard actually. I think in the last... ⁓ few days we had just signed up like 70 or so people so the promotion is working you know I'm happy that the reddit outreach and the ⁓ The X outreach has been working quite well, so pretty excited about that.

Niklas: That's really nice. think you started with an X community, right? If I have it on the back of my mind, even before the website, like a small community, and then it evolved into builders.to.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, yeah, exactly. ⁓ When we first started off, was just the community, as you were mentioning, and then we pivoted to kind of like a product launch sort of situation. So it was primarily just the products page, or excuse me, projects page on the website that had existed at the time. ⁓ built out quite a bit around that so far. You know, now we have like cross posting, we have different tiers, ⁓ tools, that sort of stuff. So pretty exciting. about the evolution so far. I need to get better at pruning, I think, and removing some of the features though.

Niklas: Yeah, think that's the challenge always, right? I've actually talked to a venture capitalist a while back who said he's a fan of tools that do one thing really well. And I think for almost anybody, there's a lot of value in exactly that advice because you can build so much stuff with AI today and you can build so much things nobody uses. I think it's good to focus. What's your feeling? Why did you go for builders.to and left?

Ben - Builders.to: Mm.

Niklas: You didn't leave eggs, obviously, but why did you decide to branch it out?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, just kind of wanted to build my own thing. ⁓ I've always wanted to make a successful social network and you know, this is kind of my first foray or jump into it and ⁓ Yeah, I don't know man. I just, ⁓ I'm pleasantly surprised and just excited about how it's turned out so far. Sorry, can you ask that question again? I'll kind of answer it a little bit better.

Niklas: Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a clear differentiator to X, right? So ⁓ to branch it out into another social network, because I don't think it's competing in any sense. It's just really different. It offers something X doesn't offer. So I was really curious, what's that value proposition for builders specifically?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, sure. initially the value proposition was just to get more visibility for folks. ⁓ You know, it's similar to like a product hunt or something of that nature. ⁓ That's how we'd kind of started out. But then we evolved kind of into like a pseudo social network because I was trying to implement the features from like X and that sort of stuff. And now this newer evolution or newer phase is focused on ⁓ community. building. So that's still something that I need to implement into the platform at a wider scale because right now it's just very fragmented and kind of off on its own thing. ⁓ But yeah, does that kind of answer your question or?

Niklas: Yeah, And I agree. think when I started out on Now It's X, but when I started out there, there was a community called Built in Public and it was really small. It was a few hundred people. Now I think it's 200 something thousand people. You will get no visibility unless you are already a larger account. You or I probably still get some visibility because we have a few followers.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah.

Niklas: But if you started out where I was when I started out, I would just be lost in noise. So I can totally follow that it's this and there's just, if you're really small, I think it's still very challenging to start out on Twitter or X and to get to that point where you have a critical mass that you actually get some visibility.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, even nowadays with like a large following, the way that they've updated the algorithm, ⁓ you know, it's a bit of a challenge even for larger accounts to get that reach. ⁓ You know, I would say the majority of the time, most of my tweets are getting maybe 200 to a thousand views. I mean, which is still great, but you know, I have close to 50,000 followers, so it doesn't really math for me.

Niklas: Yeah, it feels weird, right? It feels a little off. I would agree to that. So I would also say that a tweet that gets in that range, it doesn't really have that visibility and it will also not get traction through engagement. this is also, it's just not enough to start the flywheel to get it spinning really. You need like these few retweets and a few comments for something to work. For me, it took a long time to get there, but I think that's also for builders.jo something I really like that people can share their updates and they can talk. You say, I think you have something like karma for consistency. What's the intention behind that?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, so I'd wanted like some sort of ⁓ tokenization system and reward system for folks that, ⁓ you know, posted on the platform. So ultimately what I did is I built out like a Karma system that allows folks to earn reputation and earn different roles. So if I go to, for example, let's see, trying to remember which page this is on here, leaderboard. And if I scroll to the bottom of the leaderboard, there's a section here that says how Karma works. And it basically breaks down the bonuses that users get. So you can earn karma by, like, say, launching a project. ⁓ making a comment on something, you know, just kind of being helpful. Like you get 10 karma points for that. Five for daily update, five for an up vote, three for a comment, and two if you have an update that's liked. Then we also offer like streak bonuses and that sort of stuff. So you can get like 10, 25 or 50 based upon the seven day, 30 day or a hundred day streak. And those karma levels basically just allow people to kind of like level up. So, you know, we have like newcomer, contributor, builder, mentor, and then legend. And essentially this just allows people to be like, oh, okay, like this is a useful community member, like someone who's been in the community posting and like helping other people out, launching projects, that sort of stuff. So that was the idea behind it. And I also implemented a... kind of like an advertising token system. So as you earn karma, you're able to ⁓ then get advertising tokens and you can spend them on the advertising spot throughout the site there. It's predominantly on the left side of the feed, but you can also see it across ⁓ things like projects and I believe services. Yeah, yeah, we have projects and services there. ⁓ Services, I think right now is gated towards pro members, but I think I'm going to reduce that and probably open that up to free members. ⁓ Actually, if you'd like, can, is this audio only or should I share my screen?

Niklas: I think it doesn't help if you share your screen because a lot will be on the normal podcast and they will not see it. But it's really nice that you explain it because I think what you're saying now is very easy to understand on audio also. I think you also said you have a tiered system, right? So there's free and pro members. So why should I become a pro member?

Ben - Builders.to: Okay. Yeah, great question. So let me go over to the, if you go to builders.to slash ⁓ plans, I believe. ⁓ I'm sorry, it's pricing. Then we have four different tiers. And if you scroll down about three quarters of the way, ⁓ so there's the free tier, you get to post to the feed once per day. You still earn the karma points. ⁓ you can create up to three projects. So you can get, you know, 75 ⁓ advertising tokens basically just by posting projects and that sort of stuff. So free members can still advertise on the site right now for pretty cheap. But if you want to get more exposure and it, you know, you don't want like a product hunt type launch where, for example, you want to launch where you can like consistently get more visibility, then that's where I recommend pro because then you can get ⁓ 20 posts to the feed per day, you get 50 monthly ad credits, which allows you for one ad at the moment. And ⁓ let's see, you get a pro badge, unlimited projects, access to our Slack, weekly sprint check-ins, and you can also start to create communities at that point. ⁓ Paid communities and we'll take about a 30 % fee for that Just because the the pro membership is super low. It's only like four bucks a month at the moment but we're trying to solve some of those problems by upgrading the price. So for example, if someone subscribes to the $20 a month, then we only take 10%. And if they subscribe to the founder circle, which is $50 a month, then we only take 5%. So we try to really scale with the user as much as possible and keep the initial prices as low as possible. I'm still offering introductory pricing for Perot at $4 a month. I may eventually raise the price to about $6, maybe $7 a month.

Niklas: Yeah, that sounds interesting. I think maybe next question, when you started building it, what surprised you most when you started Builders.to?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, great question. ⁓ What surprised me the most? Honestly, just how many builders were really interested in the project? You know, we've had ⁓ well over 750 signups. We don't have that many members because what I do is I go through and like remove casinos and like a bunch of other companies that, you know, aren't related to SaaS founders and that sort of stuff. ⁓ Yeah, just the general response, the amount of page views that we've gotten, you know, we're up to I think 42,000 now since we launched. So I mean, that's, that's pretty good.

Niklas: Yeah, that's quite impressive. And I think you also often talked about stop building alone. I think Builders Tour goes into that. What are the top three reasons for solo founders' failure that most people don't see coming? What do you see with the people you have on the network?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, great question. ⁓ Biggest one I would say is probably burnout. Secondarily, lack of clarity. And third... ⁓ Third, just, well, clarity and sense of direction, I think, are kind of the same thing. But sometimes people just need emotional support. Other times people need support on where their business should head. Other times people need support on what their value proposition should be, that sort of thing. ⁓ yeah, I would say the top three definitely have to do with clarity, focus, and just burnout.

Niklas: And I think that is also something where like, you need to have a very strong intrinsic motivation in that drive to keep building alone. Right. I mean, you are also, and now we can jump over to your story a bit. It's not your first project, right? So you started with other ones. How did, how did that go? Why did you abandon them? What did you learn on the journey to builders.to?

Ben - Builders.to: ⁓ Quite a bit man. So I started my startup journey 2020 so about six years ago and Kind of on and off, you know, I started off with code career worked on that for about a year and I had primarily just used like all of my savings and Was like, alright, let's see how this goes Excuse me. I've never run I had never run ⁓ My own startup at that point had never managed ⁓ major teams at that point, so that was still a pretty large undertaking. Up until that point, I think I was a web developer for, I wanna say close to five years at that point, give or take. No, actually, I'd gotten into web development in 2015. yeah. Yeah, five years, I guess. five, six years, I would have had that experience. Prior to that, I had done marketing as well for about four years. So I had had, you know, like decent web development and marketing experience, but never any experience as a founder. So in 2020, we put together Code Career. It was... You know, this is pre-AI, so you couldn't just send out a bunch of code. You actually needed a team of folks. So I had recruited like a designer, you know, a couple of developers and we were just putting together a, you know, a small team. And we essentially built a job board. The mission was to get 50,000 junior developers jobs. Well, we kind of failed at that. We built the job board. And we were able to source some jobs from several different locations. We were also able to help people get about 30 or so jobs. But at that point in time, we were trying to do things that scaled. And as a startup founder, you know, much later I found when you start out, you have to do things that just don't scale. So we were trying to implement a systemic solution to something when we didn't even talk to users and we didn't really understand the problem set too much. ⁓ I don't think our business sense was that good back then either ⁓ because at that point in time I had wanted to ⁓ you know, make money off of this thing, but I hadn't considered like, crap, am I going to make money on advertising or are people going to pay to find jobs? Or are we making money on the back end by connecting the recruiters and then charging the recruiters, ⁓ to place jobs? You know, I hadn't really factored all that. So after about a year of just spinning our wheels, ⁓ you know, I got pretty burnt out and ran out of savings and had to go back to work. So yeah, that was my first startup. Lots of lessons in there. Be happy to dig in.

Niklas: Yeah, I mean, I think that's the, I would say standard story. I think we always hear about the positive outliers. We rarely talk about the dominant ⁓ or the majority of startups which are failures. So especially in this like do or die domain of software, the software has often been, especially in venture capital, if you say nine of 10 die. That means nine of 10 people fail to make it simple. And of the one that gets it done. So if you get it to a hundred, maybe one in a hundred will hit it large. 10 will somehow make it. 90 will fail. I think that's the history. So if you talk to people also, especially in the indie space, also the larger ones, they usually just build a lot of projects.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah.

Niklas: they hit it big and the hard thing for people I often feel is you need to realize when to let go. Like, there are obviously different options, like, okay, I've run out of money, I have no other option anymore, but maybe it's a good point in time for a lot of people to just realize that an earlier point in time, this actually isn't so great unless you have a unique insight that what you're doing actually is great. Like if you're Airbnb, you know it works on a small scale. You just know you somehow have to get to that point where you can survive off it. Then it's probably a different story that when you're sitting there, you have this product that you dreamt up and nobody's using it. Then you should maybe ask yourself if it's really that great of an idea to continue trying. to use it or maybe it's just really not that good and you should talk to the people you wanted to sell it to and see if you can build something. So yeah, I think a lot of lessons in that that I can follow up then. What was the first one that started really working for you? When did it click?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, great question. ⁓ I would say that this one, honestly, is the one that's worked for me. And I know that that sounds, that sounds challenging, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs to hear. But yeah, it's taken me six years to really fail enough to get to this point, to put in enough reps, to put in enough projects to get to this point. ⁓ I find that things that are going to turn out well typically start out well. like, If for example, you share an idea, like I shared the builders community idea, cause I was just frustrated with the build in public community on Twitter. They were blocking a lot of my posts. The admins were removing, you know, that sort of stuff. And I was trying to do engagement farming, but I was like, why can't I just create my own community and do this? So, ⁓ that was the route that I decided to take. You know, I was just frustrated with, ⁓ build in public and wanted to make my own, ⁓ my own thing. And other people seemed to be frustrated too. They caught onto that and they were like, ⁓ yeah, my posts get removed all the time. Let me go ahead and check out builders. So that's how I got my first initial probably a hundred or so users.

Niklas: Yeah, and that's pretty awesome. think this is the first validation. And then you also mentioned that you moved on with marketing to Reddit. How is Reddit going for you? How does it compare to X?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, so far so good. The depth of conversations is a little bit shallow. It's ironic because you would expect that from ⁓ X or Twitter because it's, you know, like a short form communication platform, historically has been. ⁓ But yeah, on Reddit, a lot of it is just kind of for SEO purposes. ⁓ you know, eye catching purposes as well. You know, like if someone puts a post that says, hey, what are you working on? That sort of thing. Then, you know, typically it's a green light for me to be like, ⁓ okay, cool. I can share what I'm working on and, know, just post builders. ⁓ So I've gotten some traffic from interested parties, just checking that out. But in terms of like response rate on the Reddit threads haven't really gotten like that many responses. I think. Out of the 20 or 25 that I sent out recently, I've gotten maybe one response. Whereas on Twitter, ⁓ or excuse me, on X, I'm old, so I'm gonna call it Twitter from time to time. But on X, you'll see ⁓ decent responses to the content that you share. So I found that kind of ⁓ unexpected.

Niklas: Yeah, to me, I'm, so I started out on, on X or Twitter. However, I think both names work still quite well because I actually liked the depths of the conversation in a sense that I, come from the machine learning world. That's where I was in when, before AI, before we had LLMs and, um, they were just like the people that did the leading research, I would say in the world. If you wanted to find them somewhere on social and discuss things with them, they would be on X.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah.

Niklas: ⁓ So I always actually had this and I always had also had the feeling that the conversations were just authentic. Why, when you looked at LinkedIn or somewhere, it it felt very polished on exit, just felt straight. So that's what I always liked about it. What I've heard a lot is that Reddit and both Reddit and LinkedIn actually at the end of the day, convert a lot better. regarding paid users, but that's probably also dependent on your space. I mean, you have pretty strong focus on a community that is largely on eggs, I think.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, yeah, I've been on X since 2011. So, ⁓ you know, a bit of a sunk cost fallacy too. You know, I should probably be investing more time in LinkedIn. ⁓ You know, as you said, much better buyer intent. ⁓ Yeah, I don't know. I like X for the same reasons, man. It's just like, you know, casual conversation. You can, you know, meet people such as yourself and just have, you know, these sorts of conversations. So I think it's, ⁓ know, produces a lot of serendipity, which is nice.

Niklas: What I am also wondering, and that's a big shift when we stay with AI is I think we now have a very different toolset. Like as people who like to build something, now we can actually build it alone. How did that change for yourself? You said in the beginning you had to hire a team, you had to find people to do the work for you. Now you probably also have Claude Cote or something like that. ⁓ And it does the work. How does it work for you?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, so my workflow has changed quite a bit ⁓ Quite honestly, I was a terrible manager. I mean a nice manager I was good at being friends with people but not so great at just being like hey you need to do this ⁓ So I feel like I'm a lot more productive now because I'm not trying to convey my vision to other people and then get them to execute on it and then basically do a feedback loop of like, ⁓ okay, this is good, but this needs to be tweaked. So let's change this. Now I can just ship new features within 20 minutes, 30 minutes sometimes, fix bugs in well under an hour. And ⁓ it's really nice. If I have ⁓ a wild hare and I'm just like, all right, let's chase this and go put out a new feature. I can do that if I want to, which is good and bad. There's scope creep issues. But ⁓ honestly, it's nice not to even have a scope. and not having to communicate with an entire team of like something that you just randomly come up with and like want to change is beneficial to me. I enjoy being a solo founder in that regard, at least from a build perspective.

Niklas: And from the community perspective, how much do you leverage builders.to yourself?

Ben - Builders.to: Quite a bit. Actually, if you check out the leaderboard, I think I have 600 karma at the moment. So yeah, ranked number one on the site. I've been posting pretty much every day since its inception. Kind of an unfair advantage to a lot of people that are just starting out, but yeah, I use it quite often. I try to dog food all my products and use all my products as much as possible.

Niklas: I think that is also key. Like if you use it and like it, it's more likely that other people will use it as well. I think now also we are not only building with AI, but we are also all building AI wrappers of thought. So what do you think is going to be happening in this space? What will separate the builders who will last from those who will fail?

Ben - Builders.to: ⁓ good question. ⁓ Honestly, the answer is simple, just persistence. ⁓ I would say that's the vast majority of builders and founders fail because they give up. If you don't give up and you keep showing up every day, regardless of whether or not your finances are good, regardless of whether or not the business is making money, ⁓ and you're busting your ass and you're like, this is gonna happen regardless of how things turn out, then yeah, you're gonna be successful. ⁓ But if you're the type of founder that's like, ⁓ well, let me try this and it didn't work out, let me change gears and try another project, let me try another project, let me try another project, then... ⁓ And much like me in the past six years, those were the mistakes that I made. I kept just hopping from project to project to project, rather than sitting for at least six months on a particular project that I knew was a good problem set and really work through it. So hopefully that sheds some light on that a little bit.

Niklas: Definitely interesting. then moving on with persistency to your goal of 1 million builders in 2050. If you reach it, what will this actually mean for builders.to? What will it look like?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, great question. Well, I mean, that's 20 years in the future, so I can't really say what it's gonna look like, but ⁓ I just picked up a pair of ⁓ Mentra glasses, actually. And if you're familiar with the meta ray bands, it's essentially the same thing, but these are open source. So I just recently started VibeCoding an app that will integrate with these. you can basically just say, ⁓ into these, actually let me just pull them out and I'll show you the layout of them. sure if you can see this too well but you know you've got like speakers here and here And just cameras on the other side here. yeah, it just displays right in here and connects to your phone. You can just say, hey, post an update to Builders. We'll connect it via the API. ⁓ The app still isn't finished for these quite yet. ⁓ But yeah, you can just say, post to Builders. ⁓

Niklas: Yep.

Ben - Builders.to: and it'll do an update for you. We're going to do other API integrations in the future as well. So I foresee ⁓ in the future a lot of things becoming AI and, ⁓ excuse me, not AI, AR and... ⁓ Augmented reality focused so I feel like that's that's the next platform shift, you know speaking with Robert Scoble probably about a week or so ago and that's really got what got me to pull the trigger on buying these is I had been taking a look at them and I wanted to be you know, and a really adopter and Was like I'm not sure if I should and then this guy, you know, I speak to Robert Scoble and he's written like eight books you know, technology, futurism, that sort of stuff. So I was just like, okay, well, if he's bought them and he's an early adopter of Instagram and a ton of other things that, ⁓ you know, X and a ton of other platforms that he's joined. I'm like, all right, cool. Maybe I'm headed in the right direction. So anyway, I bought a pair and I'm this, this coming month, I'm going to work on integrating builders into the whole thing. So you'll be able to see notifications, hear notifications, you know, receive them and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I don't know. I'm super excited about it. I think we're also going to go web three. So people can do like minting of projects and that sort of stuff and bring it on chain. So they'll have like a ledger of all their projects so they can kind of take that with their wallet somewhere else. ⁓ So still very much in the works on that. You know, that's a couple of months down the line after I get the glasses situated. But... ⁓ Yeah, I mean for the short term that's where I'm at. Long term, I would imagine it'll probably be a BCI, brain computer interface or something like that and people could just post updates to Builders that way in 20 years.

Niklas: Yeah, really very interesting. think I also had Robert on the show. He's quite a futurist. So this is really, really amazing. Also for the listeners who want to listen to it again, you can find it in the old podcast. think also regarding the ⁓ camera glasses, I think he said we are still a bit off.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah.

Niklas: from ideal world, it will take a while, but we will definitely have a few of these glasses. So this is definitely something I can follow why you're building and why you're moving in that direction. This is really, really nice ⁓ in this direction. And then I think in a startup and also in building, we deal a lot with uncertainty, right? We rarely know the outcome of what we are doing. We have some predictions, we think about it. And I also read that you play poker. How does this affect your decision making? Do you use some of your poker skills in Builders.to?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, great question. ⁓ I had at one point actually created a ⁓ game in Builders that would allow you to vote on, ⁓ well not vote, but essentially gamble with non-monetary tokens on founders and their outcome of their business. In reality, it didn't turn out great just because of the way that I had set everything up. ⁓ But the concept was still there. And I really liked playing with that. And I think in the future with ⁓ just my gaming background and my enjoyment of poker in general, strategy in general, I feel like I'm probably going to create another game or two ⁓ in the next couple of decades.

Niklas: And we still, like playing, right? So this is also something ⁓ that sticks with us. When you think about other founders, what do founders often get wrong about risk and uncertainty?

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah. ⁓ damn. What do they get wrong about risk and uncertainty? Fear, I would say. If I had to name it in a word, I would say fear. ⁓ People fear what they don't know. And a lot of first-time founders or new founders are just afraid to jump in because they're concerned about the risk and uncertainty. But the only way you can remove uncertainty is to go through the process and learn and fail. Derisking is a different ⁓ beast altogether. I feel like if you have savings, it definitely puts you in a better, more advantageous position. Like I've heard of people that will just quit their job and start a business with like no savings. And that doesn't typically work out well for people, I think. So to de-risk things, would highly recommend. ⁓ you know, savings and realizing that you're probably going to fail the first couple of times that you try a startup. mean, sure, there are NFL players who, know, are fantastic, you know, pro sports players who are fantastic and natural born at what they do and such to our startup founders. Sometimes they're just natural born. They get into YC, they have entrepreneurial like, you know, ⁓ Family and friends who can kind of help guide them and all that stuff and they'll do great the first time out of the gate but for the vast majority of people, you know, just normal people with a average IQ or slightly above average IQ then Yeah, I mean you're gonna fail. You know, it's just the nature of the beast so to de-risk it just make sure you got money in the bank and ⁓ You're you know you you're not failing until it's ⁓ until you stop working on it is my opinion.

Niklas: I would even go one step further and say, if you can build or de-risk it part-time, like next to your job, these days with AI, depends with what you're looking at, right? So if you're looking at hardware, it's probably a fully different story, but try to find a customer, try to find a user. Don't quit before you have found that. If somebody says they will actually pay you, already paying you, you are so, so much further ahead than everybody who has this idea in their mind. There are a lot of things you cannot inference. You can have a really great idea and a really great execution that hits a terrible market and you just fail. It's not like the... It's then just timing. So you just didn't time the market. Everything went wrong. Outside of your set, yeah.

Ben - Builders.to: That's a great point. Another point on de-risking is, ⁓ as you were mentioning, choosing the right market. You wouldn't want to go into a ⁓ newspaper advertising industry or something like that. It's now probably not the best example, but an extremely diminished market and still shrinking market because attention is just elsewhere. Excuse me.

Niklas: Yeah, 100%. It's what we call a red ocean market. So it's extremely competitive. There are large established player and they are just trying to survive. So for you to enter, you would have to have a very good idea and also market segment that you can address that the others are not really playing for. If you don't have that, it's probably very challenging. Same in other areas. And these days, I mean, you can build a landing page with pricing and you can just see if people click on the pricing and want to sign up. So this really easy to do. Don't even build a wait list, build this and just track if people want to sign up and buy. You don't have to have anything behind it, but yes, you will burn a few leads maybe, or they cannot really finish the sign up, but you will get some... proper data on the point that people buy it or not. And this is really easy to do for digital products today. And I would highly recommend that to anyone starting out to go into this de-risking before jumping into it head first and drowning.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah.

Niklas: Outside of that, if you had to give a clear advice besides that starting out, ⁓ what should people do?

Ben - Builders.to: So as like a first time founder, ⁓ what should people do? Great question. ⁓ Well, I feel like we've covered it to some degree. As you had mentioned, de-risking it, working part-time, ⁓ you know, having those savings. ⁓ What else could a first time founder do to de-risk? Let's see. Well, ⁓ probably nowadays, because I'm thinking of like a bunch of old ways to go about it. But honestly, nowadays you could just use AI, you know, come up with a business plan that way. ⁓ Use AI to come up with a business model after you've gotten the business plan together. then do exactly what you were recommending, which you just put together a landing page and stripe or something like that. You have a pre-list or a pre-signup situation so people can pay you ahead of time. and you just get paid prior to actually developing the product. Much like a ⁓ home developer or someone like that, ⁓ where they take reservations prior to even building, ⁓ you can do that nowadays. And you can do it in 30 minutes as opposed to a week in creating a landing page, for example. So it's it's so easy nowadays and the only barrier to entry I think for most folks is that fear So getting over that ⁓ Just that initial Concern of like ⁓ can I do this or I you know, I don't feel like I can do this Don't worry about it. Just do it man That's that's my take on it. Anyway

Niklas: Yeah, I can only 100 % agree. Just launch. Put it out in the world. See how things go. Ben, this was really nice to have you. I'm really looking forward to how builders.to will evolve over the next years. I'll probably have you back down the road. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Ben - Builders.to: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.