#240 – Capturing a Valuable Market from the Bottom Up with Amjad Masad of Replit

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these Indie Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with, Amjad Masad, founder of Replit. Replit, one of my favorite companies, probably because I think the strategy is just so cool. Like, I'm, like, very captivated by the strategy. But for listeners who don't know what Replit is, maybe, you can introduce them to your product. Yeah. Totally. So Replit is an online programming environment, a collaborative environment, but also a community. Community of builders, a community of learners, a community of educators. It's a sort of one stop shop to go all the way from writing your first line of code, learning programming, to shipping something. So we'll host it for you. We'll also give you primitives to build on top of. We'll give you a database right in your IDE. We'll give you auth, give you pretty powerful compute infrastructure. And, you know, our vision for this is that you at least initially should not worry about all the utter torture of setting up a development environment, maintaining the packages, maintaining the environment. And we just wanna make it really easy to get started, really easy to share with other people, really easy to collaborate with with other people as well. Yeah. It reminds me of, like, in a way, like, video games. Like, I just started playing this game the other day called Hades. And I don't play a lot of video games, but once I do, I just, like, get deep into it. And, like Yeah. If you get really good at this game, there are so many different options and configurations and different variables and different powers and power ups and, like, a million different things. But the very first time you go through the game, all of that's turned off, and they just have you play through the level with the most basic stuff. And you don't have to see any of the complexity. And back in the day, that used to be good enough for being a software engineer. But, like, today, it's like you're immediately jump in with all the options turned on. And so I think what's cool about Replenet is, like, you kinda, like I guess you can give users, like, sort of a graduated experience to learning how to code. Like, they don't have to see all that crazy stuff, but they also don't ever have to, like, stop using Replit and be like, well, this is as far as Replit can go. Now I've graduated. I'm gonna go, you know, go use a real, quote, unquote, programming environment. But I think, like, stepping back for a second, one …