Use your job salary to pay 10-12 part-time Upwork contractors

Joseph ChoiAre you doing all this yourself, or you're hiring people?

Dmitri MirakyanYeah. Um, I think something else that I did differently from a lot of other indie hackers is like I I hired people pretty early on. Not full-time people, but like literally like contractors on Upwork. Um, people doing like everything from like Our our dev was working 40 hours a week, but like everybody else, like people that helped me write email sequences, people that helped me with SEO, people that helped me manage ads, people that like like a designer, people that helped with Webflow. I think at one point, I had like 10 to 12 different contractors, most of them working only a couple of hours per week.

Dmitri MirakyanI was a manager at the time, and like I I don't know. I've been doing management BS for a while. And so like it helped that I had like still like I I didn't need to pay myself the money. I could afford to be not profitable for a while, cuz I still had my day job. But I I found it much easier to like scale by like having people to help out. There was like a customer support person that I paid like $5 an hour that would handle a lot of different …

Dmitri Mirakyan… There's like something like I don't know, like I borrowed money from like a drug dealer at one point to pay for like food in college. There's like there's just like there's some there's some like scarcity mindset that I think certain people have and I'm one of those people where like it is I found it very, very terrifying to like leave something that was like secure up until I knew that like I had like something resembling an infinite runway.

Dmitri MirakyanUm, and I also told myself that like, honestly, like my the the the argument that I made with myself is that like I was making a lot of money at Opendoor, and I would actually take that money and reinvest more of it into growth. So, I actually wound up being unprofitable for the last year that I was at Opendoor, cuz I was spending I I would like pour extra money into experimenting with things, experimenting with new growth channels, experimenting with stuff, versus doing it all myself. I like wound up hiring more talent and like running it in the red and treating this as like, "This is better than me leaving Opendoor and just doing everything by hand."

Dmitri MirakyanIt's like if my hourly rate is like what, like $150 an hour and I can hire a bunch of people for $50 an hour that know better than what I'm doing.