[00:00:28] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Alex Hillman.

I had a,

 like, a joke I was gonna put together for you, Alex, where I was gonna be like, "You're like the good Alex." there's something about a business builder, community builder guy, that just gets me juiced. And you-- like, the founder, calls himself the Fearless Leader, which I love, of Indy Hall, the 10K Consultants project, the Tiny MBA book. you own dangerouslyawesome.com, which I can imagine is, you know, not worth a million dollars these days. But just in general, just a very cool dude I

happened to stumble across. and Alex, I love to have you on. So what's up, man? How are you?

[00:01:03] Alex: I'm doing good. I was just saying we, this past Sunday did probably one of the more, more ambitious, like, large-scale community events that I've worked on at least since 2020, and I am both so energized by the experience of being in a room with, like, 100 Philadelphians from across all of these different tech and creative communities who came together to make things that would make Philadelphia better, and I am mentally and physically exhausted from all the run-up to make that happen, the follow-through, and then, you know, just putting all the pieces back together this week, of all the, you know, the things that caught on fire while I was focused on that amazing experience.

So, you know, I'm in that weird duality that I feel like every entrepreneur understands, that like I'm buzzing with energy and I really need to lay down. So that's where I'm at today, but I'm really happy to be with you.

[00:02:00] Jay: I'm glad, I'm glad. What was the event, by the way?

[00:02:04] Alex: So the event was a Hackathon where, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about Indy Hall, but a Indy Hall is both a community and we have the place, the Indy Hall clubhouse, and we also work with lots of other community builders. And I've had this dream for a long time of bringing all of those other community builders together in a room and saying, what could we build together if we shared a goal?"

And the goal for the day was a theme for the Hackathon, which was good neighbors. What does it mean to be a good neighbor? And I love that it's both broad enough to be interpreted into different interests from, like, how do you make a neighborhood nicer because of, like, trees and getting rid of trash and litter?

But also, like, how do you connect people that are in dire need of resources with the resources that already do exist but maybe are inaccessible or confusing, and everything in between. So, you know, getting to watch, like I said, over, over 100 people come together, form teams the day of, and go from nothing existing to at the end of the day, we had 24 demos and pitches that...

This is the crazy part, Jay, and this is where, like, proof that math is not my strong suit. Around 3:00 in the afternoon, I was, like, counting up and I said, "24 teams. How long is it gonna take for all these demos?" It took two and a half hours. It was like a James Cameron movie. 

it was a haul.

But everybody did so much amazing stuff, and,I'm so proud of, you know, what they all did. And, you know, for me, the mark of a good,a good event is when people during the event are saying, "We're gonna do this again, right?"

And I got that all day long. So, you know, it, felt really special. It felt like the start of something new that I hope carries on, and not just an Indy Hall thing, but maybe something much bigger than us.

but, yeah, no, it was awesome.

[00:03:52] Jay: I feel like if we would just talked about the ideas and the projects you have either in flight or about to start, we would probably never even get to the podcast. you have so

much stuff going on. I wanna go back to the start. Where does all

this come from? Where did you grow up?

did this, I usually ask, like, did it have an impact on you being an entrepreneur? I obviously have that question, but also, more importantly, where did you get this sense of community and, like, this love for people that you have?

[00:04:18] Alex: It's such a good question, man. You know, I... So I grew up in the Lehigh Valley, you know, about an hour and a half north of Philadelphia. I grew up in a very small town called Hellertown that,is famous for a couple of things. if you're driving on a nearby interstate, you might see signs for Lost River Caverns.

It's an actual underground cave that's in, my hometown. and then when A&E did a documentary miniseries about racism in small towns in America, Hellertown was the first episode. So let's say I got out. but the... You know, I think the answer to the entrepreneurship question, I have to give my dad a ton of credit.

My dad, and I share a trait that I would best describe as being emotionally unemployable. I watched my dad be an entrepreneur, not because he wants to build businesses, but because the idea of working for somebody else just makes him itch, and I feel the same way. And, and so, you know, all the versions of entrepreneurship that I've experienced I think are versions of what I watched my dad do growing up.

You know, he paid his way through college fixing cars. He started a, you know, home office chiropractic business that was all cash and just focused on serving, like, local community customers, and then made a weird mid-career pivot into, like, custom home remodeling and doing everything from, like, custom cabinetry, high-end bathroom remodels, big fancy decks in, like, North Jersey McMansions and stuff like that.

And so my dad has always been this kind of, like, multifaceted entrepreneurial guy. And then I think I gotta give my mom credit on the community side. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, 'cause,another thing that I don't think we're gonna have a whole lot of time to get into today is, although we can talk about it a little bit with the 10,000 Independents project, is, you know, community advocacy and organizing.

And my, both of my parents were very involved in the school board growing up, and it was a thing that I didn't really understand. And they were involved in local politics and all these other things, and I was around it, but I didn't get it, and if anything, I was probably annoyed by it, 'cause it was a thing that, like, pulled my parents away from me.

but obviously they did it 'cause they care about, you know, me and my sister and they wanted our school to be good and all these things. But, you know, one of my favorite stories about organizing was coming home in third grade and complaining to my mom that the fish sticks at school in the cafeteria were garbage.

I promise this is going somewhere. And, so my mom hears me and she goes, "The fish sticks? are they... Like, what's wrong with you?" I'm like, "They're just gross. They're inedible." And she goes, "Are you the only one who thinks that?" And I said, "No, everybody thinks that." And she goes, "Well, if you write a letter about it, do you think that your friends would sign the letter and agree with you?"

And I said, I guess. Probably." And so she helped me write a little letter about how bad the fish sticks were, and then I went to school and had a bunch of my classmates sign it, and she helped me take it to the principal, and the principal took it to the superintendent, and we got the garbage fish sticks removed.

And it was, it's like in third grade, this experience with the encouragement of my mom to say, like, "If you think something is wrong and other people agree with you, you can come together and make it better."

And, like- I can think of other experiences through, through high school where, you know, a little bit of organizing and a little bit of civil disobedience got, change made.

And, you know, I'm sure there are other things as well. You know, I think the synagogue that I grew up in, my rabbi I think did some really kind of unusual and amazing things by like, at age 14 I remember doing a comparative religion course right after I was bar mitzvahed, and getting to go to other religious service ceremonies and realizing they're using different words, but they're all saying the same thing. 

[00:07:59] Jay: Right. 

[00:08:00] Alex: These are our neighbors. like, what's going on? And like, so I feel like those are the kind of things that absolutely influenced and shaped the kinds of decisions that I've made throughout my life and career, and the kinds of things that I work on. I think at the end of the day, my priority for everything comes down to the, all those things, which is like, I think people are amazing, and I think people have the capacity to do anything if they put...

Not just if they put their minds to it, but if they do it together. And I feel like doing things together is, like, the number one through line through everything that I've done that has been worth doing.

[00:08:40] Jay: Beautifully said. tell me about Indy Hall. So, I know there's a few phases of it. I know there's probably a million things you could talk about it. Let's talk about it specifically from a business perspective.

I think there's lots of coverage of you, even you specifically, of like these sort of communities and like how, what they bring and all...

But like let's talk about the brass tacks. Like, first of all, how did you convince somebody to pay you to come, you know, your first tenant or, you know, first... You have a clubhouse, so like whatever the hell you wanna call... I don't know what you call those people, but

[00:09:10] Alex: The 

members, 

[00:09:11] Jay: But it's not, it doesn't, that even feels like too rigid for what I saw when I walked in there. It was less members. It was like

[00:09:16] Alex: There's something else. Yeah, you're totally right.

[00:09:18] Jay: whatever. There's like whatever. so where did the actual idea come from? And then like get into, okay, let's start it and get the first few people and get it rolling, and

then we can get into kind of the rebuild, you know, post-COVID.

But let's talk about the initial start. Where did it come from?

[00:09:36] Alex: So I wanna say that the initial idea wasn't so much of an idea, but it was a problem, and it was that I had, back to me being emotionally unemployable, I had left an agency job. I was a web developer, specializing in, like, front end HTML, CSS, JavaScript stuff. This is mid-2005, '6, '7. so mid-2000s.

And I loved everything about going out on my own and getting to kind of run a s- a very small, one-person business the way I wanted to, work on what I wanted to work on, when, where, how, pick my clients, pick my collaborators, all those things. But I really missed the good parts of a so- like socializing during a workday.

Working from home was really isolating. And it's not that I felt that necessarily at the time, but, my girlfriend would say often, she's like, you should probably leave the house a little more often." and the other part of it was when I did leave the house, I would go out in Philadelphia and I'd look for people like me who had also made this intentional choice to leave a more traditional,you know, job at a medium-sized business or larger and go out and do my own thing.

And all I could find were on the technology side was all like old school tech user groups, right?

And they were more interested in the way things were than where things were going. And then the business groups, I'm in, you know... I'm pretty sure in the first year I got, turned away at the Pyramid Club because I was wearing sneakers.

And I'm going to all these events with a bunch of, you know, old dudes with gray hair talking about big business stuff. And I'm like, "That's not really what I care about either." For me, business is the means to an end. It's a vehicle. It is... There, I do love kind of the, the game of the mechanics of business, but I think I only really figured that out much later.

So I was really craving coworkers, the good parts of having coworkers, and struggling to find them in my own city. And I almost left Philadelphia to go to the Bay Area where it seemed like my peers actually were, and it was a failed attempt to move to San Francisco and I had a, you know, a Silicon Valley startup,job offer and it fell through very last minute and I kind of bailed and I said, "What am I doing here?

Why was I leaving?" And I was like, I don't think it was for the job. I don't think it was actually for California. It was for this sense of community that I was craving and I could not find in my own city. But if I could find it, or in the beginning of it, I, it's not that I could stay, it's that the city would be complete for me.

I loved so much else about it. And so the idea really was there. It was can I find those people in Philadelphia? And if I can, everything else kind of falls into place. And so I did start finding those people one by one and slowly connecting them to each other, and a community starts to form. There's a lot that can be said about community building and the mechanics of it and the psychology of it, but I think at the end of the day, finding individuals and connecting them to each other is the heart of the entire game of community building, right?

So that community starts to take shape. We start going to other people's events together instead of alone. That's transformative in its own really interesting way. We start doing some of our own events that just kind of filled in gaps in our interest. and one of those was so from a well, you know, one of these early community members said, "You know, I know a bunch of us are going to cafes to get out of the house.

What if we all went to the same cafe?" On the same day on purpose. And it was one of those, like, like head explode, that's so obvious. why haven't we done that? We did it, and it was awesome. even though it was an unproductive work day by most measures, it was that kind of social battery recharge that I'd been craving so deeply.

And we started making that a rhythm, and eventually that turned into the question of, well, what if we had our own place to do this anytime we wanted? And I'd seen some examples of people using this term co-working to describe something similar to what I thought our crew was talking about back in San Francisco.

I'd become friends with those folks in San Francisco as we're kind of learning about these things, and I said, "I think that what our community is asking for is this thing that is this very, very..." There was literally, like, three co-working spaces in the world, none of them in Philadelphia. and I was like, "I think that's what people want."

And so by the time we were thinking about a business, there it was not that we were business planning, it was that we knew the people who wanted it, 'cause it was us. We understood the problem that we had pretty deeply and we were able to talk about what we actually needed, and that included, you know, what location of the city we would be in and what we could actually afford, and kind of just, like, work backwards into, well, how do we pay to have a place that other people can show up at too?

And there was no membership model that existed. Everything before us was either, like, a co-op where it was just, like, however many people it was, the cost got split X ways, or it was what I like to call a sugar daddy model. And I'm sure you've seen versions of this in your world as well being, you know, working with all the agencies, where the agency, like, rents more space than they need, and so they, you know, open up some desks or tables or a room to the public.

I actually... My last full-time job at an agency, while I was building this community, I went to my boss and I said, "Hey, I'm building this community of creative people who are the kind of people that we would hire anyway. What if we just, like, opened up some desks for them to come and work with us, and that way they'd have a place to get out of the house, we could hang out?

And when we do need to hire a freelancer, we're not scrambling to hire some rando who may or may not get the job done. We can hire directly from the people that we already know and trust." And he was like, "That's a crazy idea, Alex. It'll never work." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And it was not the thing that made me quit, but it was on the list, right?

so, so yeah. I mean, th- the next thing you knew, y- th- that first space, I think i- Handy Hall's such an unusual business because in a lot of ways it mirrors, like, a almost like a Lancaster barn raising, where it is the community coming together to make a thing that the neighborhood needs, that a new neighbor needs, or those kinds of 

[00:15:48] Jay: Yeah, but there's still like-- And this is the part that I f- I find super interesting about communities, is that yes, that is true, and yes, the connecting part is the most powerful part of the community. I totally agree with all that stuff. There is some weird Wizard of Oz type shit going on with people like you and people like me who build communities for different stuff, like mine are typically online or whatever.

But there is like this, just this, there is something about it where there-- You, you can't take credit for it

because then you look like you're... Like number one, you shouldn't really because it's really like you said, it's the people that are doing the work. it's like

running a good company, right?

Like if you're a good CEO, nobody there is like getting

yelled at in front of a bunch of people and like, it's like you're just like this big like group of... Anyway, so I love it and I think, there is something there, you know, that I would love to be able to like... who are those people?

Like who are-- Like how do you identify another community builder in Alex? Because there is a skill set there, and I don't know if it's just like I can recognize two people would be friends, like or what is it? Like what is it

about you that allows you to build communities?

[00:17:01] Alex: I think it's a really good question, Jay. I think there's two things. One is I think there's a certain,

[00:17:08] Jay: I don't think most people know how to be that curious. I think they could, but I don't think they've got the muscle for it. And so I, I wish I had an answer for, again, exactly what built that muscle. I mentioned some of the things, you know, at the start of our conversation.

[00:17:23] Alex: But I think, you know, I, and I can also, like, I can also say that with confidence because my partner now, Adam, who you know, has been working with me at Indy Hall for 14 years, did not come in as a business partner.

He came in as, like, basically almost like an executive assistant for me, and then I was like, "Oh, we got something special here." and, you know, now, like, you ask any person at Indy Hall and they would tell you Indy Hall without Adam isn't a thing. and a big part of that is because I think Adam might be the only person I can think of who is actually better at that infinite curiosity for the next new person than I am.

And I think there's... I... The, and the last piece I'll say about it is, and this is more, like, I think for the mechanics of business listeners, is there is a flywheel here, is that when people show up to Indy Hall and they are met with the energy that Adam for the most part, or previously me or any of the other people that have kind of been in that role, when they're met with that energy, I think something else happens where the permission to be curious is unlocked and the experience of being a part of this community helps that grow.

Because when people come in, the first impression is likely to be Adam or myself, but very quickly they're gonna get that experience from another member and another member. And like, I don't know, part of the way I think about it is when...and again, I think this comes back to like the business flywheel type,design work, right?

If somebody has that experience once, that's good. If somebody has it a second time, now you've made a, you've created a pattern where they're like, "That happened twice. That's interesting." And by the third time, you establish an expectation, and that expectation, I think, is where a lot of people tip into, "Indy Hall feels good when I'm a part of it," to, "I want to be a part of what makes Indy Hall feel good."

And that virtuous cycle means that the odds of somebody coming in and having the kind of feeling or experience, like the most common thing I get from people are like, like, "It just feels good in here." and it's a, it feels like kind of a cop-out answer, but I genuinely believe and I say, "That's because good people hang out here, and if you wanna hang out here, you could be one of those good people, too."

And I just feel like people don't get that invitation often enough, and when they do, it's often got some kind of weird, like, baggage attached to it or expectations. And when we do it, it's like, "No, I just want you to have that if you want it, and it's here for you. And if not, that's okay, too." And letting people choose it for themselves and have the agency to choose it for themselves rather than being forced to do it in a certain way, like to find their own way to do it.

and because people can own it in that way, that means it's authentic, and that means the next person who experiences it, it doesn't feel like that weird culty thing where everybody just says the same words with the same inflection, and you're like, "This sounds programmed." Like, you it is very, like, it is very easy to have an Indy Hall experience and be like, "Am I joining a cult?"

[00:20:27] Jay: I love that all very much.

one thing I would like to kinda wrap or start to wrap with is, what are you doing- With, the next kinda group of co-working owners, right? I mean, you've got your blog stuff, and you've been writing for years and years, and you've got, like, some, like, really good authentic content, and, like, the dangerouslyawesome.com's, like, the blueprint for, you know, these co-working spaces. Like, are you doing that actively right now still? Are you still helping people build those up and people are launching them? Like, what is-- where is that at right now today?

[00:21:00] Alex: So I'm gonna be super honest with you. 

[00:21:02] Jay: Please do.

[00:21:03] Alex: it's, it's not something I'm really motivated by anymore.

[00:21:06] Jay: I love that answer, dude. I love that answer. 

[00:21:09] Alex: and the reason is when we were starting, and that Dangerously Awesome it was a personal... It was my personal blog. You... If you go back far enough, you'll find, like, early journaling about web development stuff I was tinkering with.

And then a couple years in, I started getting emails from people saying like, "Thank you for your article." And I was like, "What article?" And they'd send me the link, and I'm like, "That's my diary, but I'm glad it was helpful." And so that was a very organic experience to, that led me into literally training and consulting with people starting things like this on every continent except for Antarctica.

I've got, worked all around the world. And somewhere in the mid-2010s, it shifted from people who really wanted something for their local ecosystem, and they, something to be a part of, into people who started seeing it as an opportunity or real estate.

[00:21:58] Jay: Yep.

[00:21:58] Alex: And I'm just gonna go out and say this is not that.

It's not that kind of business. I think something like this is, it makes sense as a business and not a nonprofit because of the agility and flexibility necessary in order to really stay adaptive. However, I think it's the kind of business that operates best as an enabling platform for other things.

So my mental model for Indy Hall has always been that if I try to maximize and extract profit from Indy Hall, I would squeeze out the very thing that made it good. But if I make Indy Hall sustainable in a way that allows me to get the same thing out of it that everybody else that is a part of Indy Hall can, then it is an engine that I benefit from financially and otherwise in ways that are multiples greater.

I'd argue an order of magnitude orders of magnitude greater than if I was trying to make it a thing that paid my bills. 

So, like, my thinking about it right now is less... I mean, you'll notice that blog, the writing really kind of stopped during pandemic, and it was because I felt like everything I wrote was a bummer instead of helpful.

And I was like, "That's just not what I wanna put out into the world." And I think where it's evolved into is that, you know, I started mentioning that event with the hackathon on, Sunday, and I feel like I've had to refind my peers after 2023. And I've got my independent creative business peers, my entrepreneur peers.

I've found that, but for the other side of it, I was like, "I don't think it's co-working spaces anymore." It's not because the industry is saturated. I just think, like most of the people who got into this for the reasons that I did, I, either I don't think I have much to offer them that's new anymore, or the new ones that are coming in, I think we just don't have the same outlook on what this thing is.

And rather than try and convince them, I've never been into convincing people of stuff, Jay. I want to help people the way they want to be helped, and if somebody doesn't want the message, then I'm not gonna beat them over the head with it. So where I have found it is in with the other local community builders, and, like, that's local to Philadelphia, but also local to other places that people are in the world.

and to say, "Here's what I'm doing. I'm an open book. I would like anything that I do to be... that is useful to other people to be available to them." Does it turn into a new consulting practice somewhere down the road? I don't know, maybe. but,I think that the work of helping people start co-working spaces, for me, the big takeaway is that a lot of people like to use the language.

They like the idea. But when it comes down to really doing the messy human work of this, they'd rather not. and after a while, it just got kind of disheartening, and I was like, "Well, let me find the people who do wanna do that work, and let's do that work together." And if I can be of service to them...

Here's the beautiful part. My favorite part is I started learning again. Like, it got to the point where I would go to co-working stuff, and, like, I haven't heard something new, and I haven't learned something that benefits me and Indy Hall from another co-working operator in, like, 12 freaking years.

That's really frustrating. But now I work with a local poetry meetup, and I watch how they kind of architect their experiences with their community, and I'm just like, I'm in the back of the room taking notes for an event that we're hosting in our own space. So, like, I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things where maybe the, like, the transferable business lesson here is sometimes we're not very intentional about who we're getting our lessons from.

We just get them from the people who run the kind of business that we run, and I feel like that insular nature

bad things worse, and it perpetuates, you know, patterns and habits. and I've found so much more- joy and opportunity in finding adjacent communities where I really have very little, obviously in common with, but I find that one little in and I'm like, "Oh, we have that in common?"

I wanna see how that impacts everything that you do and see if there's anything worth borrowing there. And, that, that's I think the part that's got me most energized in, in the chapter that we're in now, and I think is the pattern that I'm gonna keep doing my best to run for the foreseeable future.

[00:26:17] Jay: I love that. I love it, and I love it because I always... My dad watches some of these episodes, and he always watches the ones where I talk shit on him, but hopefully he hears this one. he always used to do hobbies, and like we had like a ham radio tower laid down in our yard in Virginia in the backyard for like 20 years, 'cause he like got into it, and then he like lost interest and like went to something else.

And the

other one's golf 

[00:26:41] Alex: there.

[00:26:42] Jay: and it was there forever. It's prob- probably still there. There's like all, like there's like all this like, you know, he'd pick up this hobby and leave it, and I was always like, "Man, it's like so weird and like so annoying that he like starts all this shit." And it's probably from my mom complaining, you know, "He's just, he's going off doing his thing again." But as I got older, I was like, that's awesome. Like, that's how you're supposed to live life. Like, and that's

where like you're like, like the fact that you spent all this time and effort and you're like, you know, you did all this blogging stuff and you like developed this really cool skill set to like launch co-working consulting.

Like that's fucking super specific and weird and like awesome, you have the foresight to go like, "I'm done with that because it doesn't excite me." Like that's why I think that's beautiful. 'Cause there's a lot of work that you're saying goodbye to, but

it's because you've kind of graduated past it, and I think that's like the mature business owner, entrepreneur guys always, or girls always going like, "What's the next rung that I'm gonna go to after this doesn't make me excited anymore?"

And like I'm 40 now, and, I'm literally like, you know, honing my journaling process to write the things that like today I'm gonna get these things done that excite me, right? Like that's-- I'm trying to just go for those things, so I love it that's how you live your life, dude. that's really fucking awesome, and you're an awesome dude, and you built a really cool community, and I hope people check it out.

if people want to check it out or hear, you know, reach out to you specifically, I know not LinkedIn, you're Mr. Email. but how do they reach you, directly, if they wanna hear or talk to you about something they heard today?

[00:28:02] Alex: Yeah,alex@indyhall, that's I-N-D-Y-H-A-L-L.org. yeah, email's the one channel where I'm guaranteed to be read.

[00:28:09] Jay: dude, you're dialed in email, bro. that thing probably like wakes you up in the morning, makes you eggs. your

[00:28:13] Alex: That's right. 

my email, machinery is very good.

[00:28:16] Jay: I love it. All right, Alex, you're the man. Thank you for being on. Let's catch up again soon, and,

I'll talk to you soon, buddy. See ya, 

[00:28:21] Alex: Thanks, Jay. 

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