ex Founder & CEO
@WishTender
a safe wishlist for creators • Building a device that allows me to tweet from lucid dreams 🛌💭📡 • Self Taught Programmer • Stoic
Hey WishTender fam.
I'm sure you've seen the announcement by now. This has been a challenging time for me and my team.
We've been put in a very tough and nearly impossible position after being given many false assurances. We've had many twists and turns thrown at us in an
Last year a founder asked what my net promoter score was. I said I didn’t know that term.
He criticized, “how you expect to succeed without knowing startup terms?”
Now my startup makes 40k rev/m.
I never learned what net promoter score meant.
That founder is still prelaunch.
I’ve never been to Silicon Valley
I’ve never taken funding.
I built WishTender in my mom’s basement trying to help a friend get gifts safely.
You don’t need to do things the way everyone else does! Just build things that help people.
In case you're new to my page, I:
-Lived in a van for 3 years
-Taught myself to code in the van
-Built WT as a solo dev, after a friend said it would help them
-My spouse started working for me after I launched
-We bootstrapped the business to 50k+ users in 1.5 years
A guy will complain to me that they can't make money online because they are not a hot girl. Yet a male cartoon bobcat made over 6k today on WishTender. So please abandon your self-limiting beliefs.
Self teaching? Have patience.
Students spend 4+ years and 100k+ on a degree.
But no one bats an eye.
Learning on your own?
People judge you if you don't have a job or business after a few months.
Take your time.
Endure a few years of judgement. It will pay off.
It’s my birthday! I’m grateful for WishTender, my partner Sam, and the challenges I’ve been able to overcome.
A few years ago I began learning coding in a van. It’s been a journey since then. I hope I’m lucky enough to keep delivering value to you all for a long time!
A year ago, I coded a simple program: "My program counts the number of times you click a button."
366 days later, I've coded every day and progressed so much.
I'm so glad I took on this challenge.
For those who want to try, if I can do it, you can too.
#codenewbie
#100daysofx
Been a crazy few days.
Because of an influx of user signups causing WT to crash, I just had to emergency restart the site while I was taking a bath. 🛁🚨
I’ve been testing our beta feature, Wish Requests, in production with notes to the gifters like “this is a test, ignore” but they are all getting granted.
2 years ago today I got my first signup on my bootstrapped startup after teaching myself to code.
I got a lot of criticism; I should have launched sooner, it doesn't fill a need, you can't bootstrap a marketplace, it's dumb idea...
Instead, I followed my gut, and it paid off.
🎊 WishTender is 2⃣ years old today 🎊
2⃣ years ago our first wisher signed up & we couldn't contain our excitement.
Here we are 2⃣ years later with over 100K wishers & the feeling has only expanded.
Forever grateful to the
#wishtenderfam
💛💙
-Dash, Sam, & WishTender Team
It's been a very wild journey. WT started as a small coding project I made for a friend and exploded into a phenomenon I never expected. At our peak, we were trending daily on Twitter, and we were the number one company in our industry and the first of its kind. Unfortunately, we
As many of you know, we will be shutting down with a heavy heart after several rocky months of trying to get WishTender fully back up and running.
WHAT HAPPENED
It has been an immense struggle with ups, and mostly downs, since we were kicked off of Stripe. Few services compared
I had posted something unclear, and I want to apologize.
2 customers in the past week sent CS reps personal insults, mentioning the rep's outside life and family by name, and sending them long paragraphs of hate unrelated to the issues on the site.
I said that we banned them
WT users: Please help!
Convince Premium Chat to remove the blog post they did about WT.
It included
- fake negative reviews about WT
- lies about security breaches
- lies about fees for wishers to use WT
and more...
If you can, @ them, comment on their tweets, and spread the
I want to give my sincere apologies for the instability of our site lately.
I hope we are not giving off the impression that we don't care about uptime.
Our goal is to have 0 downtime because we know how important it is for the community to have wt available at all times.
The
My style of running a business is to treat it like running a community center or a summer camp. I want to be grounded and connected to my users. They should know my face, full name, and that I can help them out.
The CEO doesn't have to be this glamorous untouchable figure.
WishTender users, please be patient this week as my business partner, who is also my life partner, and I are dealing with the loss of his younger brother who passed away yesterday. Thanks for your patience as we get to your support tickets.
I've seen a few people talk about WishTender being venture-backed.
Just a reminder: WishTender never received VC funding.
We are entirely bootstrapped and run off the sweat, tears, and 17 lbs I lost building WT.
Last night history was made. During a lucid dream study at Northwestern, I sent researchers a morse code message from within a dream: A-S-S. This is the first documented case that a sleeping subject consciously communicated a profanity during a lucid dream.
There's a misunderstanding that to be successful on WishTender you need to be dominant all the time. On the contrary, our most successful users are super polite and empathetic when not in-scene. There's no need to be "in character" with our customer support team for example!
My brother just said that the first time I told him about my plans to build wishtender he remembers thinking it was a stupid idea and now he realizes how wrong he was
My grandpa died today. He had dementia. The last time I visited him, he barely reacted to anything I said. Except when I told him my previous month's revenue, his face lit up with awe and a jaw-dropped smile like I hadn’t seen in a long time. Glad I got to make him proud!
Does anyone want access to a new secret WT feature? (Gifters and Wishers)
Must be open to stress-testing out the new feature and sending feedback in your free time.
When I was in a startup fellowship, I scored last in every pitch competition.
There was a highly charismatic fellow. He won every pitch competition. Right after the fellowship, his startup fell apart; He got in legal trouble and went MIA with the funds he won. I'm the only
A large popular site reviewed WishTender.
I thought this was cool!
Until---> I saw they included a bunch of lies. They were promoting their site over ours.
It included
- fake negative reviews from "users",
- fake fees
- fake security breaches
and more...
Then they blocked
You can hear me on the most recent
@IndieHackers
podcast w/
@csallen
@ChanningAllen
We cover
- quitting fashion
- vanlife
- learning to code
- building
@WishTender
- marketing w/ your users’ voice
- the future of lucid dreaming
- indiehacker myths
Many of you said you'd be interested in a hashtag to get and give one-on-one help over Twitter.
So here are the official guidelines for the
#HelpMeCode
hashtag!
Throwback to 2 years ago today, I'd been building WishTender for 8 months in my parents' attic & learning to code, still yet to launch.
This login page needs to be updated 😂
1. “Build for yourself.”
I built for people who needed a product and would pay for it.
Building for yourself can be good but you may end up building for a saturated market with high competition. Many communities don’t have a lot of coders and your skills could help them.
People told me it was a mistake to not charge users.
But now my app makes 14k+ profit/m.
You know what other products don't charge users? AirBnb, Fiverr, Uber, Youtube, Twitter, Gumroad, Facebook
Don't box yourself in. There are monetization models outside of subscriptions.
DO give value to the world by:
-Helping others
-Being an example
-Living boldly
-Being brave
-Being real with yourself
-Being the bigger person
-Having empathy
-Building Things
-Taking Action
DO NOT give value to the world by:
-Tempering yourself to please others
@chrishlad
Just because someone is older and more experienced doesn’t mean they know better than you, especially when they tell you that you shouldn’t do something. Be bold and test the waters yourself.
Someone I met in a sauna today said, "I'm proud of you," when I told her I built a company after learning to code. I could tell she meant it. It isn't the first time this has happened. I really like this type of heartfelt validation from strangers.
If you're ever curious about anything at WishTender, my DM's are open!
Happy to answer any good-faith questions, even if critical.
Please be patient+kind. WishTender is a small family-run bootstrapped startup. I'm emotionally attached to it and mean comments affect me somewhat.
My whole feed is wishtender auto-tweets lately. I'm raising my auto tweets min gift price now so I don't spam people.
Thank you to the people who made this a problem for me.
I found a WishTender copycat.
Only it had strange features.
It recently occurred to me, those "features" were BUGS my product once had.
The copycat thought I meant to build it that way and copied it exactly...
Six years ago today, I got married at Jewel Osco!
People say to put off finding a partner until your life’s figured out. But if you find the right partner, you can figure a life out together. Plus, love doesn’t wait for plans! To more love, learning, and adventure!🥂
Thank you everyone who backed up WishTender recently. It meant a lot.
We are built on user feedback & easy to reach.
But as a small business, public bashing is harmful.
There's a line between constructive criticism vs making claims in an effort to try to hurt a small business
With Twitter's algorithm changing, remember that engagement isn't everything.
Yes, you can gain traction by being purposely bait-y.
But gaining traction through helping, inspiring, and providing value is more beneficial to you (and everyone around you) long term.
Someone told me they haven't started learning code because they're stuck between object oriented & functional
I told them, I'm not even sure I know the difference yet
Doing>Theory
Theory is for organizing
You only understand the context after you start coding.
#codenewbies
6. When not getting traction, “You must be doing something wrong, do x instead”
Traction can be exponential. So if it’s slow in the beginning you sometimes just need to keep doing what you’re doing for longer and you didn’t do anything wrong.
Not all of these “indie hacker myths” are bad ideas, but they are not hard rules. Consciously breaking common ideas can get you ahead. So question all the advice you’re getting and understand why you’re following it if you choose to.
Someone angry spammed our trust pilot with a bunch of fake defamatory reviews and lowered our score from 4.8 to 2.9. And it looks like Trust Pilot is on Christmas break and can't fix it during the busiest time when people are looking for wishlists. Que sera!
Throwback to a year ago today: 3 months old and 2 orders processed in 1 day was amazing.
Now: Yesterday was as slow day and we had 501 orders.
You need to start somewhere! A slow beginning is part of the process.
#buildinpublic
#indiehackers
Sold my van, aka my home for the last three years, today. I officially live in my parents basement! Bye, sweet Lucy. I probably would’ve never learned to code if you hadn’t broken down at Barnes and Nobles where I bought my first coding book.
#vanlife
#moochlife
#moochdocker
WishTender is 1 year old!
✅7000+ users
✅$776.5k gift funds sent to users
And we're finally pulling in real profit (~$14k+ in June).
Many ups + downs but WishTender progressed more than I thought possible.
Thanks to all who supported my journey!
#buildinpublic
#indiehackers
A Thread: Results of testing my Dream Phone.
The Dream Phone is my device that allows a sleeping subject to communicate from a dream.
This iteration-Dream Phone SD- induces lucid dreams, detects morse code eye messages from the lucid dreamer, and stores them on an SD card.
May Recap
This month WishTender jumped from $90k gmv/m to $230k gmv/m.
We're finally bringing in some real profit at $10.9K/m.
Plus I got $3.2k in gifts as a WishTender user!
I didn't think I would pass 10k this soon or ever. Kind of amazed.
#buildinpublic
#indiehackers
7. When not making enough money, “Raise your prices”
I had a feeling my prices were right and I just needed to go for scale. Scale takes traction. Traction takes time. So again I just need to persist and be patient.
Feeling so happy today!
I'm so grateful I get to build wishtender every day! Somedays it's really hard, but somedays it's just so fun. I feel so lucky.
Even though I ended
#365DaysOfCode
yesterday, after I worked out, meditated, and had breakfast I was like “what now?”
So I coded.
Ofcourse that’s the ultimate goal: Continue to take massive action every day. Not because you publicly committed, but because it’s your new normal.
A customer tried to get a WishTender wisher in trouble and tried to get a refund.
Corrected them that, no the wishlist owner did not violate our terms, but instead THEY, the gifter, violated our terms by expecting a service in return for gift.
Don’t mess with the
#wishtenderfam