Today you’ll hear my conversation with Ryan Kulp.
I stumbled upon his stuff while I was googling as I’m trying to learn to code this year. He wrote a great article that caught my attention and once I started reading that, I started digging into everything he’s been working on.
Ryan is the co-founder of Fomo, a social proof app growing rapidly this year, among many other interesting side projects.
We cover how he figured out coding on his own and how he gets into all this random projects and businesses ideas.
Enjoy!
Episode Notes
[6:40] Getting into coding to scale marketing efforts (rather than to get a job in tech).
- “If I’m going to stay in this industry 40 years and build something important, I have to know what I’m talking about (related to technology).”
[17:18] Isolating in Thailand to learn to code. Launching the first app in 6 weeks.
- “I made $6700 airbnbing my apartment in NY, which costed me $2100 to rent. With that, I could live comfortably in Thailand, paying $310 all inclusive for a similar apartment. With this hack I was able to make a profit by not working.”
- “In a meta-sense, it’s all about learning how to learn.”
- “Time and pressure, that’s how’s learning to code.”
[28:50] MKAY, the private micro equity fund. The math behind $1k to $20k in MRR SaaS acquisitions.
- “A lot of founders are stuck on the Fisherman’s parable.”
[39:38] Criteria to buy an app. Building a pool of investors and Ryan’s strategy to raise money.
- “The first to market usually do it best. Competitor #30 that says ‘I’m going to make it better’, they mean ‘I’m going to make it cheaper’.”
[47:50] Fomo and Fomo Publishers.
- “Word of mouth and referral marketing is the highest converting channel.”
- “Nobody cares what you say about you. People care what other people say about you.”
Links
- Ryan Kulp on Twitter
- Ryan Kulp’s company, Fomo
- Ryan Kulp’s personal website
- MKAY Holdings
- Fork Equity
- The best post ever written on learning to code
- Notify – Shopify App
- Fomo Publishers
- Justin Mares
- Mailchimp
- Zapier
- Code Academy
- Quora
- Lynda
- Treehouse
- Tealeaf, now Launchschool
- Ryan goes to Thailand
- Tesla
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- MicroConf
- TechCrunch
- Crunchbase
- AngelList
- Indie Hackers
- Paul Graham essays
- JD Graffam on the Productize Podcast
- Cross Sell – Shopify App
- Kettle and Fire
