#131 – Funding for Indie Hackers with Tyler Tringas of Earnest Capital

**Courtland Allen** (0:07)
What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from indiehackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers Podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both to their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Tyler Tringas, the founder of Earnest Capital. Tyler, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Earnest is?

**Tyler Tringas** (0:37)
Yeah, so Earnest Capital is, basically we call it funding for bootstrappers, and it's a little bit paradoxical, which usually gets folks asking follow-up questions, which is good. But it really is that. It's funding for entrepreneurs, founders, basically indie hackers, folks building businesses that are outside of the traditional kind of venture capital model and strategy and ecosystem that want to be profitable and sustainable.
But they need a little bit of capital to sort of get started. And we invest everywhere from very early stage. So writing the check that lets you go from a side hustle to work in full time on your business, all the way up to kind of growth capital for businesses doing maybe up to a million dollars a year in revenue. That's kind of the whole range we play in.
We do things a little bit differently. So we invest with a financing structure called a shared earnings agreement that we kind of invented collaboratively with a lot of folks in this community. It's just kind of better aligned for folks who want to build the next base camp or wild bit and maybe don't necessarily want to sell the business or ever raise other rounds of funding.
And then we try to do more than just write checks. So we have a community of mentors. A lot of them are pretty well-known CEOs, founders, operators in the space that are kind of on hand to just provide mentorship and obviously a community of awesome founders, including the 11 companies that we've invested in so far.

**Courtland Allen** (2:06)
Very cool. I talked to a lot of founders and by far for people who haven't gotten started, the hardest hurdle for them to get over is the fact that they don't have the resources. They don't have the time to get started on something. They don't have the money to get started on something. They're working a full-time job. Maybe they have a family, but raising money is always sort of not been an option for bootstrappers for one reason or another. You know, they don't know the investors in Silicon Valley are going to write the checks, so they don't want to try to build a billion-dollar company.
And Earnest is sort of an option for them.
What makes Earnest a better option for raising money than previously existing options?

**Tyler Tringas** (2:41)
You know, often I don't find that we're really competing with other options. So in many cases, we're not really making the case that we're better. We've sort of just found a huge group of entrepreneurs who are either looking to work with Earnest or just bootstrap. You know, it's sort of the only option for capital that aligns with where they are and what they're looking at to do with their business. So they just self-select. They say, look, I don't want to build a business that's a fit for venture capital, and I'm too early for revenue-based financing and that sort of thing. So we often don't find ourselves having to make the case that we're better, per se. Although that's something I'd like to change. I hope there's gonna be a lot more funds kind of moving into this space and that we'll more and more have to make the case that we're one of many but better.

**Courtland Allen** (3:27)
You want more competition.

**Tyler Tringas** (3:28)
I really do, yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you why. The reason here is that we need, the number of companies and entrepreneurs that are a fit for this kind of backing is vast. It's almost definitionally much bigger than the whole of the venture ecosystem, right? Because every good VC tells you they're looking for the outliers, the absolute most far edge of the risk return profile, and so there should be tons more businesses that are actually a fit for what we're doing. And so we need a lot more people in this space to help back these companies.