#012 – Traveling, Learning to Code, and Bootstrapping to $25k/mo with Tyler Tringas of Storemapper

**Courtland Allen** (0:07)
What's up, everyone, this is Courtland from indiehackers.com, and today I'm excited to be sitting down with my buddy Tyler Tringas of Storemapper. How's it going, Tyler?

**Tyler Tringas** (0:15)
Hey, Courtland, doing well.

**Courtland Allen** (0:18)
No problem. So we already did a text interview back in August. You're one of the first people to come on Indie Hackers after the launch. And then we met at MicroConf a couple of weeks ago in person.
And I told you, I think then, that your Storemapper interview is probably the one that I reference the most often when telling people about educational interviews and how to get started as an Indie Hacker, so to speak.
And the reason for that is because your story is full of lessons that are important for anyone wanting to start an internet business or a project that makes money online. So for example, and I think this is a good place to start, a lot of people starting a business struggle for months with getting their product out the door. But you sat down and built Storemapper and had paying customers in something like 36 hours. So what's the story behind that?

**Tyler Tringas** (1:03)
Well, first of all, I think it's very high praise that you're often citing Storemapper considering the sort of caliber of other entrepreneurs that you've interviewed on Indie Hackers. So that's awesome to hear again.
In terms of kind of building Storemapper really quickly, there's sort of two components of that. I mean, the first part is that it wasn't that quick in the sense of, you know, you're not counting the sort of many other products and almost products that I kind of built and launched that just totally failed before Storemapper. So the process from starting that to launching a product was actually a little bit longer. But Storemapper itself, yeah, it was basically conceived and built and launched in about 36 hours.
Essentially, you know, Storemapper is a store locator as a service. So you've probably seen this kind of a product all over the internet. You want to find out where to buy your favorite brand or your favorite new juice or whatever. Put in your zip code and kind of Google Maps comes up and tells you what locations you can buy it at. So technically, that's basically a kind of Ruby on Rails app that can sort of handle the uploading of all that information. Where are the stores? What's their addresses? What's their latitude and longitude? All that kind of stuff. And then an embeddable JavaScript widget that you can put on your website and that renders the kind of store locator.
At that point in time, I had a lot of things going on in my life, but one of the things I was doing was freelance web development for Shopify store owners.
And a couple of them asked me to build them a store locator. And I kind of did the math on what it would take for me to build that myself at my hourly rate. And I was like, guys, this is gonna, you know, cost you a few thousand dollars. And they were like, oh, sure, no problem. You know, we need it. So obviously, there was like a pretty good willingness to pay there.
So I kind of just put it down in my little idea notebook, like hey, maybe I can productize that kind of a product. And I kind of did a little research, didn't really see a good option, put it in the back pocket. And then a couple weeks later, yeah, I was booking a long flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it was like a first class flight. So I booked it with miles, kind of did a little travel hacking. So I had basically this like really long period of time in like a cushy first class seat. And I just sat down and built and launched it. Basically soup to nuts, you know, new Rails project at the start of the flight, landed, launched it, sent an email to my existing freelance clients, like everyone I'd ever worked for. And we had paying customers that day, basically.

**Courtland Allen** (3:53)
That's awesome. I think by comparison, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to work on something for three months or six months or even a year, just heads down coding, not show it to anybody, not run their ideas by anybody, and ultimately release a product that nobody wants to pay for because it's chock full of features that don't matter to them. And as depressing as that sounds, that's really the optimistic case because you know, the pessimistic case and what happens probably more often is that somebody works on something for six months, never releases it, and then just gets demotivated and shuts it down. So the case for building something quickly is not only that will you avoid adding a bunch of features that nobody wants and wasting time building things that people won't pay for, but you also are way less susceptible to getting burned out and demotivated.