Mike Hudack
speaker
274 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Hudack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like if you, if you try to build a really big consumer thing and you take a really big swing, you're going to fail nine times out of 10, you know? So like, there's no shame in that. It'll be painful. It'll sting. But like you say, you know, there's also like a certain joy in it. Um, and if I do it and it works, it's going to be great.
And so like I, you know, and it's an idea that I deeply care about. It's a thing that I think is like really important for the world. I think if everyone in the world can like send money to everyone else in the world instantly and like for free or almost for free, like that's a transformative thing that will literally change the world. And so it also feels like a worthwhile endeavor.
Like it feels like a nice thing to spend, you know, three to 10 years of your life on. Right. Um, which I think is really important because like, if it were just like, you know, selling like candy or like food coloring that like causes cancer or whatever, or, or like, you know, plastic clothing, I think that even if it worked, I would feel really shitty about myself.
And so that I think really truly matters a lot, at least to me. Um, I like to find meaning in my work, you know, positive meaning in my work. Um, And so that's how I ended up doing this. And I've worked on food delivery. I've worked on banking. I've worked on social media sharing. I've worked on advertising.
I think you can kind of like, you know, when we worked on ads, like, you know, a lot of people were like advertising is bad. And we were like, no, no, no, no, no. Advertising is good because it helps connect people who are building a valuable thing. with people who need that thing as efficiently as possible. And that's actually like a service which makes the world a better place, you know?
And I think you can think about a lot of things in a way that, you know, creates value and doesn't destroy value. The question is whether or not you're going to enjoy it, whether or not you're going to love it, whether or not you're going to get up every morning and want to work on it for maybe a long time.
Yeah, I feel you, man. I think that like I'm not the sort of person other people may be like this. Maybe, you know, like I'm just not the sort of person who is like good at that kind of like marketing. I don't know, like mercenary business thing where it's like, oh, I see a lot of people with dirty cars around. I want to build a car wash. It's just like not the way that I think about things.
Like I think about like wanting to create new things or like interesting puzzles or gifts that you can give people or whatever and joy you can get from the work. I get bored. Otherwise, you know, it's just like not interesting. Like, oh, you know, Sure, maybe it's a nice way of making some money, but ultimately, who cares?
Uh, not directly, but I do think that like, there was a point in my career when I felt really bad about copying anything. I was like, Oh no, you have to come up with everything yourself. And like, I no longer believe that at all. Like, I think there are just certain primitives or certain ideas that become commonplace and like should be replicated by everyone.
And you have to be like, you know, it's like impossible that you're going to come up with all of those yourself. And so, um,
it's like a big world you know um and so i think you have to watch what all your competitors are doing and other people in adjacent spaces and when they do something really great or something really brilliant be like oh okay like we missed that or we should have prioritized that earlier all right well let's do that and i and the way that i think about that now is like these are just primitives like if somebody had said well i'm not willing to copy the wheel
That would be really stupid. Like if the only person who could ever produce a wheel is like the person who originally conceived of it, we would all just be in the dark ages, you know? So I think that you have to kind of like look around and see what all the smart people are doing and have a deep respect for competition and the noise around you.
While, and this is so important, and I'm curious your view on this, right? Is like, while not,
um getting pulled in a million directions you still have to be true to your vision and the thing that you want to see created in the world and you you know you can't just be like oh oh that's a shiny thing over there it seems to be doing well let's change what we're doing and change the thing that we want to exist in the world because of that and it's a balance and i you know i i struggle with that balance all the time of like oh well there are a million things i want to build how do i pick the two
that are like the most important and true to what we're trying to accomplish, you know?
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that you have to have a consistent narrative and a consistent, like a consistent narrative internally and externally and in yourself as a human about what you're building and what you're trying to accomplish too.
I used to work on ads and I think that there was probably a golden age in which the answer would have been like, you know, target exactly the right message at exactly the right people on Facebook, find the like 3,400 people who are your early adopters and just like get it in front of them 15 times. I'm not sure that's the thing anymore.
I think that the auction has gotten saturated and tracking has become worse and like all that kind of stuff. I think that like, you know, Twitter and LinkedIn and podcasts and everything are probably the way to do it. And I think, you know, the way that we've done it so far is just to kind of like build, build in public sort of.
I think that probably means like a specific thing, like the letters are capitalized or whatever. But we've just been like from the very earliest time we could, we introduced the product. We, we kind of like shipped it with a wait list and then people would come to us and be like, oh, can I try it? Or our friends would ask to try it and we'd let them in and then we'd get their feedback.
And sometimes it was really broken. And like, even now people ask me like, when did you launch? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, what do you even mean by launch? I don't know what that means. You know, do you mean like the first time we were at an app store? Do you mean when we started to remove wait lists? Do you mean when like,
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