I’m joined by Marc Lou, a serial entrepreneur and indie hacker legend, as we explore innovative startup ideas, and his frameworks for content marketing, gamification, and pricing1) Sell Digital Products• Create courses/ebooks on what you know• Focus on life-changing hacks (e.g. better sleep)• Use gamma.app for slick lead magnetsPro tip: Share your personal journey, not just advice2) Document your journey publicly:• Share what you're working on (Twitter, YouTube, etc.)• Creates initial traction & builds audience• Find your authentic voice over timeKey: Use "I" statements, not "you should" when starting out3) Smart pricing strategies:• Always use a paywall• Don't undervalue your work• Research competitor prices• Test one-time vs. subscription models"When it's cheap, people will undervalue the product." - Mark 4) Harness the power of gamification:• Inspired by Pokemon Sleep's $100M success• Apply to habits: sleep, diet, workouts• Use leaderboards, points, rewards5) Gamify GitHub commits for devs!• Combine Github commits with credit card point system• Create leaderboards and scorecards for commits• Leverage word of mouth and social for growth6) Stripe Atlas alternative for indie hackers • Legal setup & tax optimization• Simplify global business setup• Explore international business structures• Premium support services"It's the #1 question I receive on every YouTube video." - Mark on legal advice!Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND MARC ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/marc_louvionYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@marc-louMarc Lou: https://marclou.comEpisode Timestamps:0:00 Intro03:26 Startup Idea 1: Sell Digital Products10:32 Framework for Content Marketing16:21 Framework for Pricing Products24:07 Framework for Gamifying Apps/Life30:37 Startup Idea 2: Gamify GitHub commits for devs!33:07 Startup Idea 3: Stripe Atlas alternative for indie hackers
Getting started with something simple is the best way to get more ideas, to build a tiny audience, to get feedback, to learn. There's just so many things that just roll after that. Having a course, a book, I think it's the easiest way to get started. And so, yeah, that's the entire point is to start with something simple.
There's this sense as a business owner that if you charge a subscription, then you will get monthly recurring revenue. So you get $10 in January, you're going to get $10 in December, and it's going to keep going like this. But What I do is I tend to remove any subscription and I really ask myself, do I need that subscriptions?
A friend of mine is telling me, if you have a recurring payment, you should provide recurring value.
You need to build that idea because that idea is so smart. I'll build that with you. I need a notepad right here. That's a successful Startup Ideas podcast and you have to pull out your notepad and you're like, okay, let me just take a note on that. All right. I am so excited to have you, Mark, on the show, on the Startup Ideas podcast.
On my Mount Rushmore of indie hackers, I've got Peter Levels, I've got Danny Postma, and I definitely have Mark Liu. So I finally got you to come on. I agree to come on the pod. You're here and welcome.
Man, thank you so much. Big fan of the pod. I've watched a lot of episodes and I'm happy to be finally in here.
You're here, man. You're here. And you came prepared too, which I love. So you've got a list of a bunch of ideas. And I take your ideas very seriously because you've been able to build a pretty big audience on YouTube. You've made money. in revenue, millions of dollars at this point. So which one of these ideas do you want to start with? Because they're all pretty interesting.
Just before we get started, I got lots of ideas. Lots of them are terrible, but I try all of them and eventually some of them ended up working. So whatever I prepared, some of them might not be the best, but it crossed my mind and I think it's worth exploring.
Yeah, and it's funny because sometimes the bad ideas end up being the good ideas.
Man, that is absolutely crazy. That reminds you that even with years of experience, you'll still not really know what you're doing.
Yeah, exactly. And sometimes you just got to put it out there and make it ugly and just see what happens. And it strikes a chord and you're like, wow, I actually can't believe how bad of an idea this is, but it's actually... interesting to people.
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes the opposite happens when you think you have an amazing idea. You spend two months building it and then nothing happens. I guess that's the open zones. I think... I think one good part to get started is there is this gold rush for SaaS products. Because we hear amazing stories of a kid who used no code and made a million dollars using a SaaS product.
But I think there are tons of products before that that are much simpler to start with. And I think one of them is teaching what you actually know. you probably have a background, whether you've been studying something, you've been, I don't know, it could be a sport background, could be employee backgrounds, having a course, a book, I think it's the easiest way to get started.
So yeah, you're right. Everyone knows something, but how do you know, just because you know something doesn't mean the thing that you know is what someone wants to buy necessarily. So for example, It might be way easier to sell someone how to build a SaaS online than it is to sell someone how to make ceramics or pottery or cups.
Maybe there's a big market for that, but I just know that the customer value for... how to build SaaS maybe is bigger than maybe the ceramics. So the question to you is, how do you think about the customer here and how much they're willing to pay? Or does it matter?
I think that's my case. I like the creation process. And I wouldn't think too much about the customer. I would still create it. And I would think about something that changed my life. And building a SaaS is one of them. But sometimes there are little things that are, I'm talking about very simple things, but like how to sleep better. Like for instance, I see the impact on my sleep on my day.
If I have a good night, eight hours of sleep, I wake up, I'm pumped. My entire day is like a blessing. But now if you're talking about getting the perfect night of sleep on repeat, It's much harder than just being lucky once. You need to go to bed at the same time all the time. You need a specific temperature. You need earplugs. You need all these kind of things and it becomes complicated.
And this is something that you could sell to anyone. Everybody needs a good night of sleep. And I remember in 2021, that's one of the things that changed my life. That could literally something you could build in like you could make a PDF in a day and you can sell that to start.
Don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast.
But the main thing is, most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The Idea Bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash flowing business is waiting for you. So that's really interesting.
So when you were saying, you know, everyone knows something, basically package it up and you can sell it. I was thinking more of like a hobby or something like that. But what you're saying is actually, no, you might just know something about life. Meaning you might know... just some life hack, basically, like how to sleep better.
And if you write out, like as a prompt, what are the 10 life hacks that you've learned in your life? Maybe it's how to get to the gym consistently. And then what you're saying is, okay, write down all the life hacks and Write a PDF. You can even use tools like gamma.app, which is kind of a really, it's like a tool to really make lead magnets quite easily that I've been using. Have you seen it?
No, I haven't. I was Googling it.
Yeah. Yeah, I've been obsessed with it recently. If you go to their website, it doesn't say, like, we make lead magnets. But I use it for lead magnets. And I use it for just making beautiful websites out of content.
Yeah. Yeah, because design matters a lot here. And even if just ideas is very simple, having a good... landing page, like the one you, you talk about, like, this is one of, um, one of your favorite, I think it was a newsletter or tweet of yours that says the tweets size or tweet bites landing page. I think, man, that's such a great way to get started without overthinking.
You can have a call to action by a little course here or there. And. If you do the work to launching a little bit everywhere, you know, then you learn a lot about what's happening and what's not happening. You learn about creating headlines. You learn about putting your ideas out there and stop overthinking.
I think that's the first step when you're starting in this journey, even if it seems simple. That's the point. That's the point of like, you're just getting started. Then you can, you know.
Yeah, I think the counter argument that someone makes when they hear something like this is they go, okay, great. How to sleep better. Like I'm going to go make, maybe I can make $50,000 a year with this. But I think what you're saying is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you're saying is that could just be the starting place. Meaning once you put out this PDF around how to sleep,
You might have an idea for a sleep supplement or, I don't know, like an eye mask business, right?
There we go. Yeah, that's the point. That's the starting, that's the ignition of the business. I think there's like, sometimes you get this idea and you think that's going to change everything in this world. You know, this is like full throttle, all into it. But I think it's a journey and an idea is just a part of the journey. And there will be so many ideas in that longer journey.
And getting started with something simple is the best way to get more ideas, to build a tiny audience, to get feedback, to learn. There's just so many things that just roll after that. And so, yeah, that's the entire point is to start with something simple.
If you were, let's just say you were creating a digital product around how to sleep better, what are your next steps? Like, okay, you have the idea and then, you know, how do you name it? How do you, you know, what, how do you generate traffic to it? Like, how do you think about growing a digital product like that?
Okay, so if we're talking about something very simple, like creating an ebook to sleep better,
I would definitely use a medium to share what I'm working on. So if I'm comfortable on the camera, I'll definitely go on YouTube or TikTok, Instagram. If I am better with writing because I'm a little bit introvert, then I will go on Twitter. And I would learn how to share my ideas, learn how to share what I'm currently working on so I can create content out of my daily life.
And that would create, it wouldn't make a buzz at the beginning, but I would create an initial traction. You would get five to like, I don't know, 10 people who just look at what you're doing and they'll be here when you're launching. That would be the first step.
Yeah, and I want to say one quick thing on this. So, dude, I... and I applaud you for doing this, but I was, I was for a while, I was recording the direct to camera videos where I'd be like, here's the 10 ways to do X, Y, Z. And I, and I, you know, would do these videos and I hated it. I hated it, man. Like I, I really, really, it felt really unnatural to me. And, um,
Whereas on Twitter and writing and even doing these long-form podcasts, it feels very natural to me. But writing a script and staring into the camera made me feel very weird. And sometimes feeling weird is... It's not really feeling weird, actually. Uncomfortable. Sometimes feeling uncomfortable is the necessary evil you need to go through in order to do something great.
But at a certain point, I was just unhappy and I hated doing it. So I think the question for people, if they're going to document their path, you have to ask yourself, which format is good for you?
Yeah, man, I can relate so much to that. And if you go back to my Twitter accounts in the very beginning of the journey, like 2021, 2022, you would see tweets of me when now with cringe, because I'm trying to tell people what to do.
I think the mistake we do, and I think it's kind of natural because you open YouTube and you see videos with million views of, I don't know, Alex Hormozy, who is telling you five mistakes you're making as an entrepreneur. Like there is this teacher mindset and you're like, I'm going to copy that. I'm going to imitate. I'm going to teach them what I know.
But at the beginning, you don't know anything. So you want to start by using I and not you. So I did that. I learned that. And then maybe later in the journey, when you start to have a bigger following, you've learned a lot. Then maybe you can start teaching and telling you should be doing this or stuff like that. I think it's a good idea. finding the right medium.
So Twitter, like YouTube, Instagram, whatever this is, and finding the formats on how you tell your ideas. I think this is, this is very important here. Took me. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think about format a lot too. So what you mean by format is. Like saying I did that today and not you should do that. Right. And, and, and how do you like, so a lot of people are going to agree with you. Yeah. A format, but how do you, How do you develop your own format?
There's a lot of content around developing your own voice, but developing your own voice is very different than developing a format that is going to work and get shared by people. How do you think about that?
Those are good questions because I can really retrace the beginning of the journey. I'm like, hey, I was actually thinking about that. I think it comes to... finding, consuming content, and picking the little things you like from each creator. For instance, I like the mindset of Peter Lavelle to say, I did that, and having lots of little projects.
And I copied that, and I put it in my head, and now it's part of me. Maybe some of your audience know Justin Welsh, a really good writer on Twitter. I like the way he writes. Like it's very clear, concise, super simple to understand. I was like, okay, I love that. I took the way he writes and I put it in my head. I'm like, now that's part of my identity. And I mix those ideas
creators in my head and it becomes my identity so my identity is not really my identity actually it's like a mix of lots of things I found everywhere plus what I've discovered along the way but at the beginning there's literally nothing and if you go back to my Twitter you really see that things have changed a lot from the very beginning yeah so it's interesting we were talking about Mount Rushmore earlier
it's almost like you should create your own creator Mount Rushmore for your formats meaning pick three or four people who you really look up to and then write down what is the one or two things that you take away from their content that you want to implement into yours and then from that go and experiment with different formats exactly that cool All right. And then, okay.
So then you start creating content and how do you, you know, how do you sell the PDF? How do you think about pricing it? Um, or ebook?
Oh man, pricing could be a, could be an entire YouTube video of one hour for, for that. I think you want to start with a paywall. You don't want, you want to avoid launching free things. Unless you're passionate about, unless you have a really good idea and you think it could work, otherwise you want to have a paywall because that teaches you a lot of things.
Um, you don't want to price too cheap because obviously when it's cheap, people will undervalue the product. And as you're getting started, if you sell 10 PDF and each PDF is like $1, then at the end of the month, you're not even paying the bills. So you want to have the motivation and for that you need to price a little higher than expected. You look at competitors' prices for that.
If you don't know how to price, it's just really a bunch of... But yeah, I would go for one-time payment for sure at the very beginning, especially if you're selling a course.
I would say one thing you can do is get all the data around competition. Seeing where you sit in competition I think is really helpful. So make a list of all the data points around what people are selling it for. Take that data, go into Claude, let's say, and do a prompt. Be like, hey, I need you to help me price this. You're my pricing partner. Pretend like you're
the best pricing expert on the planet. I always say, pretend you work at Walmart or you're the head of pricing at Walmart and the best in the world and you get paid a million dollars a year to do this. And here's the data. I want to price this product. What do you think I should be priced at and why?
And that, if you're like a solo indie hacker type person, just going back and forth with AI will help refine what your first price should be. Yeah, it's crazy good though. Yeah. And then the other thing to note about pricing, and by the way, comment on YouTube if you want us to do or you're interested in a pricing episode.
I don't know if people are down for that, but I think you can always change your price too, right? Yeah. Yes.
I've been playing a lot with that. I started with very cheap and cheap subscriptions with a long free trial. And then I ended up removing the free trial, pricing higher, and sometimes removing the subscription. I think it really depends on the product.
I think there is a rush towards subscriptions because there's this sense as a business owner that if you charge a subscription, then you will get monthly recurring revenue. So you get 10 months in January, you're going to get $10 in January, you're going to get $10 in December, and it's going to keep going like this.
But I think as a customer, it's kind of a pain to have subscriptions because you have Netflix, Spotify, et cetera. And so in the customer's mind, When you see a subscription, you're already thinking what happens if I have to cancel and I forget. And when you create objections in the mind of the customer at the moment they purchase, that is usually impacting your conversion rate.
And what I do is I tend to remove any subscription and I really ask myself, do I need that subscriptions? A friend of mine is telling me, if you have a recurring payment, you should provide recurring value. which usually falls in the category of software for businesses.
Like if you're using, I don't know, like a scheduling tool because you have calls every week, then it makes sense to have a recurring subscription.
If you look at, there's a lot of product that can actually remove the entire subscription model and have a one-time payment or a system, like a credit system that works really well too, that doesn't push the customer to make a big commitment and it's easier to sell.
Who do you think does pricing well? What are examples of people who do pricing well? Before we move on to the next startup idea, I just have to ask selfishly. Examples from indie hikers or any company? Could be anything, any company.
I'm interested in it because I'm just interested in companies that do pricing well, because I think there's this shift happening right now to your point, which is like people are getting sick of monthly subscriptions. And so I'm just interested on who's innovating or who's doing interesting things in pricing. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in.
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Nobody really likes paying. So there's nothing that comes in mind. I think I remember seeing the Meta subscription, the Meta usage, where I was like, oh, that's cool. But I don't have any company in mind. One company that comes in mind when it comes to pricing, it's a smart move on their side, but as a customer, I don't like it, is Stripe with the fees.
If you actually look at your monthly fee, that's a lot of money. I think that's where I spend the most money in my business, like probably $5,000 a month. They got 3% for the cards plus an extra 1% if the card is not from Europe. plus an extra 1% if you're charging another currency, and plus 0.4% if you want to make an invoice. In the end, you pay like 5% to 6%. So it's smart for the business.
And as a customer, I'm not a big fan of it.
Yeah, I think that's like the pay-per-usage model, which is the more you use it, the more... In theory, you're happy because, oh, you're making all this money there and you're happy to give them a cut. And if you're not making a lot of money, then you don't give them a cut. But the reality is it would be great if it was a sliding scale, meaning maybe it's 2.9%, let's say 3%.
I don't know what Stripe fees are, but let's just say for the sake of this conversation, that's 3%. up until 100,000 of sales. And then for 100,000 to a million, it's 2%. And then a million and more, it's 1%. Man, yeah.
You just remind me of a pricing I saw that was really smart. But it was years ago. They were charging higher. It was a subscription. They were charging higher on the first month. Or they were charging you on the first month for a baseline that they show on their site. And then it decreases after like two to three months.
And so as a customer, you don't want to cancel because otherwise you lose what you already gained by being a customer for the past three months. I cannot remember the company, but I thought it was a really smart pricing.
That is really smart. That is really smart. Like no one's doing that. Yeah. Yeah. That makes me want to ship something and just try it just to see. That's amazing. Okay. Um, moving on to your next idea and idea number two, what do you, what do you got? All right.
If we step, um, all right, maybe we can move from that. Whatever course you're trying to sell, there's something I love and it's maybe speaking to only gamers out there, but I'm a big fan of all the Farcraft. I've played games for so many years and I try to gamify things that have a purpose in real life.
So for instance, you could gamify your sleep, you could score points, you can compete with friends, you can lose money if you don't get good sleep or if you don't track your habits or something like that. I think there's a lot to do in the gamification system because Everybody wants better sleep. Everybody wants to eat better. Everybody wants to work out.
And I think there is a gamification things that could help people achieve their goals. And that could be a software by itself.
So you would have to... So I buy the thesis, which is gamification helps people do things and create streaks and results. So, but how would you like, which vertical is most interesting? You know, would you, I think sleep is really interesting. Um, but by the way, sleep, like I'll show you right now, like I use eight sleep, the mattress and it's like a smart mattress.
And the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I check my sleep fitness score. There you go. And so I slept well last night, 99%. Um, And then you can see like your REM sleep and your deep sleep. So you can see that I like, you know, it's gamified. Like this is gamified. Yeah, yeah. You're not wearing any ring or anything. Is it the mattress tell you that?
Just the mattress tells me that. I don't know how it does it. I don't ask questions.
Yeah, I think in this case, it's, I think it's a mattress company that sells the app on top of that. So that's eventually on a call on a podcast, you would end up talking about the mattress because it's interesting. Normally you don't talk about a mattress. I think that makes a lot of sense, but that would require you to already have a business.
If you're setting a course about how to sleep better, you could bring a little board of all the people who purchased and make them compete. For sleep, there is Pokemon Sleep, an app that was released, I think, a year ago or something, which makes $100 million a year. And basically, the better you sleep, the more your Pokemons will grow and evolve.
Wait, so Pokemon Sleep is making $100 million a year? Did I hear that correctly? Yeah.
I don't know what is the license fee they pay for the Pokemon license.
It's pretty insane. Okay, wow. I'm just reading this now. This is absolutely bonkers. They have... They made $100 million on 9.8 million downloads. So... That's pretty crazy.
That's $10 per download?
Yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I think the nostalgia of Pokemon combined with a real-life goal, that's something big.
Okay, so here's the unlock. Here's the idea. The idea is this. The idea is we all know the things that people want to do. Sleep better, eat better, all the things. You can ask Claude, you can ask whoever, you can ask your mom. These things don't change. Human beings don't change.
We all know that gamification, leaderboard, status, badges, streaks is a product design tool that helps people achieve their goal. It sounds like, what is the unlock that Pokemon Sleep has done? Well, they've licensed... the intellectual property of Pokemon, and they've added that to this whole concept of gamification, et cetera.
So the question is, the way I'm thinking about this, and I'm like really excited about this, as you can see, is what is an opportunity to license a brand and just basically, the idea is this, it's Pokemon Sleep for Axe. You license the IP. And by the way, someone's going to be listening to this and say, well, yeah, easy for them. They probably paid so much money for Pokemon.
And you'd be surprised... like how cheap some of these licenses are to, uh, to get, to get, um, maybe not Pokemon, but like to get amazing licenses for nostalgic intellectual property, you'd be surprised how cheap they are. I don't want to, uh, I don't want to say who it is cause it's, it's someone everyone knows, but there's someone who I know who got the license, like went to, um,
Basically, what do they call it? Like a French, not a franchise. It's like an intellectual property conference, licensing conference in Las Vegas. He got a Star Wars for some apparel. He basically bought the Star Wars license for some apparel line. And he thought it was going to cost, he's like, Star Wars is huge, right? And he's like, oh my God, it's going to cost millions of dollars a year.
And it ended up costing $50,000 for the first two years. and some percentage of sale. I think it was like two or three percentage. But now all of a sudden you can do Facebook ads with Star Wars on it. So, huge. Yeah, that's crazy.
I mean, yeah, man, I would love to grow my Jedi as soon as I ship a startup. My lightsabers becomes, I don't know, double or something. Just so many. And we're talking about general stuff like sleep, or workouts, but you could go deep into niche, like, developers who commit, this is an app I have in mind for a long time. I'll probably build it in years from now.
It's like every time you make a commit as a developer, it's pushed to GitHub. And there is like this super addictive GitHub things where you have like a grid of all your commits across the last 365 days. Every developer is wherever your software engineer is using TypeScript or your Peter Lovell is using PHP and don't care about anything. Everybody knows about that and everybody loves this grid.
And man, I kind of, I want to bring that in and make a massive leaderboard of commits or whatever grids, something that makes people want to push some code online. This is one of the millions of niche where you can gamify gamify habits goals. Yeah.
Dude, you need to build that idea because that idea is so smart. Think about. During the Web3 craze, there was an app called Sweatcoin. I don't know if you saw this, but it was basically based on the amount of steps that you took, they would give you this coin. So it gamified walking. Think about credit card points.
The more you use your credit card, the more... I think credit card points meets GitHub... commit idea is a massive idea. If you could be the place that people, like the more I commit, the more points I get. And yes, there's a leaderboard, but it also allows me to redeem for something. I think that's the idea that you should do. There you go, man. That is my way.
There's a financial incentive, yeah.
Okay. I'll build that with you.
I need a notepad right here. That's a successful Startup Ideas podcast when you have to pull out your notepad and you're like, okay, let me just take a note on that.
The track record you have, because if that ended up working two years from now, it's like, this idea was born on the Startup Ideas podcast. Exactly. We documented it. I'm really taking note of that one. I'll CC you, I'll DM you if I ended up building it.
Cool. We have time for one last idea. Can I pick one? Okay. Because there's one I'm curious about that I've thought about for many years. I almost don't want to bring it up, but we'll bring it up because I said it already. Legal for entrepreneurs. What do you mean by that? Oh, okay. I thought it was your idea. No.
I've been exploring this in the space for a few years now, but I haven't built anything in this space. So I'm curious what you mean by legal for entrepreneurs.
Oh man, I dropped it here because this is the number one question I receive on every YouTube videos I make. Where did you set up your company? How does it work? How did you set up your strap account with that company? The same question every single time. And the thing is, I think there is an opportunity for an info product for sure. So people understand a little bit better about what is going on.
How does the thing work? Because it's mostly, it starts with that. And eventually for a service where you have, you marketplace where you match people and their needs and the legal entity that they need. I am terrible at legal stuff. Like this is something that it pulls my hair. So I spend as least time as I can on it. But I think there's a real need because people ask all the time.
I think so too. I use Stripe Atlas to set up my companies. It's just integrated with Stripe, obviously. It makes it pretty easy. But I wish there was someone I could talk to at Stripe Atlas too. Sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I should start an LLC versus S Corp. You know what I mean? It feels like there's an opportunity to make it a little more educational and have a more premium version.
I guess the idea I have here is more of a premium version of Stripe Atlas.
Okay, I think in your case it's probably an advanced version maybe to optimize your taxes or something like this?
Yeah, I mean, so the example I'll use is we set up an LLC for one of our businesses in the States. And it started making a bunch of money. And we didn't realize that we should have converted it to an escort. Which is another type of corporation. And that cost us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of taxes. And we would have set it up probably as an escort from the beginning.
Um, but we didn't know because we were just on Tribe Atlas. Um, so I wonder, so if you think about like legal, there's as a spectrum, right? On one end of the spectrum, you have, um, calling your, like calling my Manhattan name.
lawyer paying my manhattan lawyer eleven hundred dollars an hour to set up a company which is something we've done before you know which sucks like take it's painful literally so painful that you know just it hurts my soul that that's one end of the spectrum and the other end of the spectrum you have self-serve striped atlas type products that for like a couple hundred bucks get you all set up it feels like there's something in the middle
All right. I think, yeah. Maybe because in New York... I think you're from Canada, right? I'm originally from Canada, yes. I think there's... What I see is from people who are usually not from the US. Because for you guys, there is this easy option of Stripe at last.
And you're American. I mean, you're from Canada, so... I'm a green card holder. So I live in the US now, mostly. But I'm still... It's, it's basically, I'm like an American. Yeah.
So you paid taxes in, in the U S now?
Yeah. I pay taxes in the U S I don't pay taxes to Canada. Okay.
Okay. So yeah, you've, you've been, cause I look, I look at my situation. I am a French person who is married to a Korean woman in living, living fiscal, like take my tax. I pay my taxes in Bali. There was an infinite ocean of options. Where would I pay my taxes? Where would I pay my company? Where would I open a company?
Because I don't need to open a company necessarily in Indonesia or in France. I can open it in Singapore. And so you have like so many options. And sometimes like, yeah, but you have Cyberclass in the US where you pay 0% taxes. Why not opening there? And then you realize if you do that, then you're not, you own a company like there and you live in Indonesia, it's maybe illegal.
There's this like entire system where it's like completely fucked up. And I think that's why people are asking. It's more like not trying to optimize taxes, but to understand the system, where should they set up their company in first place so that it's working? Because now that you work with a computer, you could work from anywhere in the world. You can live anywhere in the world.
So there's this ocean of options, which creates as well an ocean of thoughts.
That's interesting. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't even consider opening a company outside Canada or the US. To me, it was like, that's where I would open a company because that's all I know. But you're right. There are probably other places that I should have considered for a bunch of reasons.
Yeah. And I think for you, it also makes sense where you are because you might have employees, et cetera. So it's the more things engage. For me, the company is one person. It's me. There is no employee. There is no one else. There is eventually a contractor to edit my videos, but that's it. And so that gives me an enormous amount of flexibility to where I go. But on the downside, where do I go?
And that was the tricky part where I was not really sure where to open first. Interesting. Yeah. And people really ask a lot.
Like it's number one question. So I guess Stripe Atlas for indie hackers with maybe a little more support is probably an interesting idea. Yeah.
When I looked at Stripe Atlas at the beginning, I was living in France and And I hired someone, a lawyer, and he told me if you own a Stripe Atlas business in France, like you're going to get flagged. They won't like it because it's like zero percent tax heaven. And so either you would get double tax as if it was a French company. So in that case, that makes zero sense.
Or if one day you get an audit, then you're fucked. And I was like, that's the moment where I started to realize, like, wait, so what, you know? And then there's this entire process of like, okay, I can have a company abroad, but then I need to move abroad as well. And then, yeah. And then that's when the troubles somehow started.
Then you have the regulation that changes in every country because at some point everybody was talking about Dubai. That's the place to go. And then they changed the regulation and it became more expensive. And I was lost. I was like, okay, fuck. I'm not going to optimize anything. I'm going to do something simple.
I'm going to go there and boom. I like it. There's something here. Someone in the comment section is going to be like, I'm going to do something. So I'm happy you flagged it and I appreciate it. Marc, merci. I appreciate you coming on and spending time with us. Where could people get to know you and your products a little bit more?
Marclu.com, M-A-R-C-L-O-U.com. This is where all my websites are. My revenue is public and there is my Twitter and YouTube link as well.
Beautiful. Check it out. I'm a big fan and hopefully you come on the pod again sometime. Cheers, man. It was nice having you. All right. Take care.