Indie Bites: Recent Episodes
James McKinven
Short, bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses. You'll learn how they come up with ideas, what they do to validate, find those first customers and make a sustainable income. Episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Jonny White is the founder of Ticket Tailor, a platform for selling tickets online doing over £6m ARR and growing. Jonny founded Ticket Tailor in 2011, grew it to £2k MRR and then sold it to a company called TimeOut a short while later. After a few stagnant years at TimeOut, Jonny then bought the company back to make the lifestyle business he’d always wanted. After hitting all his goals, Jonny made the decision to build out a team and bootstrap the company to profitability and beyond. Now with a team of 20+ people, Jonny has a whole new set of challenges he’s dealing with, which we dig into in this episode.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:51 - Jonny's background
- 02:48 - The idea for Ticket Tailor
- 04:39 - Getting those first few customers
- 05:14 - Reaching £2k MRR and considering fundraising
- 06:34 - Selling the company
- 08:00 - Buying back Ticket Tailor
- 09:17 - Post buy back
- 11:13 - Hiring a team / going beyond a lifestyle biz
- 12:12 - COVID
- 13:59 - Losing motivation post-covid
- 15:45 - Recommendations
Recommendations
- Book: Donut Economics
- Podcast: Missing Cryptoqueen
- Indie Hacker: Pietro Saccamani
Follow Jonny
My links
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Join the membership
- Personal Website
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
- This Indie Life Podcast
Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙
EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.
Ryan Gilbert is the creator of the Workspaces newsletter, which showcases the best workspaces in tech and beyond. He grew it to 6,000 subscribers and $2k per month with sponsors + affiliates, before being acquired by Loops (Founder Chris Frantz was on episode 61) and going on to be their first employee. In this episode we talk about how simplicity has been so important for growth of the newsletter, how he makes it appealing for guests to share and his reasoning for selling at such an early stage.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:26 Life before Workspaces
- 03:37 Did you have any side projects before workspaces?
- 04:47 Growth of the Workspaces newsletter
- 06:40 How long did each edition take?
- 07:45 The best workspaces
- 08:25 Monetizing the newsletter
- 10:22 Selling the newsletter
- 13:08 Imposter syndrome
- 13:57 Recommendations
Recommendations
- Book - The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
- Podcast - Creator Science
- Indie Hacker - Brett Williams
Tim Leland is the founder of T.LY, a link shortener with almost half a million users that he recently quit his job to pursue full time. Tim started out building chrome extensions, including a weather extension that grew to 200k users at it’s peak. He then capitalised on Google closing down their link URL shortener and tried to build his own competitor, which is where T.LY was born. Tim has gone for the high volume, low price option for his product, which often isn’t recommended as a good route for Indie Hackers, but Tim has made it work.
- 00:00 Intro
- 05:15 Building a portfolio of extensions
- 07:45 Starting T.LY
- 10:06 Being the low price option
- 11:49 Getting users for T.LY
- 12:51 Quitting his job
- 15:13 Reccos
Recommendations
- Book - Atomic Habits
- Podcast - My First Million
- Indie Hacker - Rob Walling
In this episode I’m joined by Colleen Schnettler, which a lot of you would have heard from through her Software Social podcast she co-hosts with Michele Hansen. Colleen has been on quite the journey over the past few years, going from years of contracting to launching her first product, Simple File Upload, then getting a large contracting gig with Hammerstone, landing a separate full-time job to then quit 3 weeks later to rejoin that Hammerstone as a co-founder.
What we covered:
- 00:00 Intro
- 02:03 Why start the Software Social podcast?
- 02:59 Why start building products
- 04:04 Colleen's first product: Simple File Upload
- 05:07 Why they stopped the podcast
- 06:37 Joining Hammerstone
- 08:50 Being a solo founder
- 10:16 Hello Query
- 11:47 Closing down a successful product
- 13:50 Reccos
Reccomendations
- Book: The Mom Test
- Podcast: Boostrapped Web
- Indie Hacker: Corey Haines
Follow Colleen
My links
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Join the membership
- Personal Website
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
- This Indie Life Podcast
Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙
EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.
Marc Louvion is an indie hacker with many many products. His tagline on his website is relatable for all “I was fired everywhere so I had to work for myself (even Tai Lopez fired me...)”. If you go to Marc’s Indie Page you can see all his projects, including Habits Garden, Gamify List, Visualise Habit, Make Landing & more. Marc is living in Bali and on his way to $5k MRR across his projects. You might have seen Marc on Twitter with his hilarious launch videos and candid build in public updates.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:32 Marc's indie hacker journey
- 03:07 Moving to Bali
- 03:39 Starting a glove business
- 05:52 Gamification
- 07:41 Challenges with gamification
- 08:29 Knowing when to quit a product
- 10:32 Portfolio of projects vs single focus
- 11:46 Marc's day to day
- 12:53 Building an AI product
- 14:00 Creative launch videos
- 15:14 Reccos
Recommendations
- Book: Why We Sleep
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Danny Postma
Follow Marc
- Explore Marc's products
My links
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Join the membership
- Personal Website
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
- This Indie Life Podcast
Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙
EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.
Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, a product that helps newsletter operators grow through referral partnerships. Indie hackers might know Louis from his Sales for Founders course which he ran a few years ago, as well as his many other projects.
What we covered in this episode:
- How Sparkloop Started
- How Louis met his cofounder Manuel
- Going Niche vs Broad
- Pursuing a growing market
- What is your unique competitive advantage?
- Avoiding shiny object syndrome
- Speaking to your customers
- How does a newsletter referral program work?
- Can you start a referral program from the beginning?
- What’s the value of a newsletter subscriber?
- Sparkloop calculator
- Sparkloop growth from day 1
- How big is Sparkloop?
- How to start and grow a newsletter
- Louis’ favourite newsletters
- Lenny’s Newsletter
- Morning Brew
- Why We Buy
Recommendations
- Book: Wuthering Heights
- Podcast: Default Alive
- Indie Hacker: Josh Ho
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Join the membership
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
- This Indie Life Podcast
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
Kyle Gawley is the founder of Gravity, which he’s bootstrapped to over $25k p/m. In 2012, he scaled a vc-backed company, called Get Invited, to $5m in sales, before a near-death experience made him rethink how he lived his life. Now, Kyle is travelling the world building his bootstrapped SaaS. Let’s find out how he did it.
Join the Indie Bites membership 👈
What we covered in this episode
- Starting out on the VC path
- What Kyle loved about working in VC
- Having a near death experience
- Listen to Kyle on Indie Hackers
- How he changed his life after
- Deciding to become a digital nomad
- Starting Gravity to solve his own problem
- What Gravity is for non-technical folks
- Pricing, should you go cheap or upstream?
- Using Twitter and SEO for customer acquisition
- Kyle’s thoughts on single focus vs small bets
- Kyle’s new AI project
Recommendations
- Book: Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl
- Podcast: Indie Bites (how meta)
- Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels
Follow Kyle
- Personal site
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Sam King is the founder of Flick, a tool for managing and growing your social media, doing over $3.5m ARR fully bootstrapped. Sam has taken a unique path into bootstrapping, first being a YouTuber, then running an agency before flipping it into a SaaS with Flick. There is an hour long extended version of this show available on the Indie Bites membership, head to indiebites.com/membership to sub.
What we covered in this episode:
- Starting out as a YouTuber
- Pivoting from YouTuber to starting an agency
- Pivoting the agency to start a SaaS
- Marketing Sam used to grow Flick
- Affiliate marketing
- Building an MVP
- Hiring challenges
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog
- Podcast: Diary of a CEO
- Indie Hacker: Baretto
Follow
- Sam on Twitter
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Figura
Often great design makes products stand out in this day and age; stop trying to figure it out yourself. Figura offers vetted product designers for startups and fast-growing companies. Find your first designer or contractor, or land a helping hand for your product in less than 48hours. Save $199 and start your project for free, using code "INDIE199".
Head to figura.digital to try it out.
Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio, a SaaS business that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses, co-host of the fantastic podcast Software Social and author of the book Deploy Empathy, which is all about how to do great customer interviews. We cover a lot of ground in this short episode, including how to write a book, building in public and mental health as a founder. Along with some concrete tips on how exactly you can do customer research.
What we covered in this episode:
- Michele’s podcast tour
- Building in public
- Why context is important for Twitter debates
- The real reason Michele wrote her book
- Starting with a newsletter
- How to do customer research
- How to understand your customers
- Changing their podcast support model
- Mental health as a founder
- Being a founder with ADHD
Recommendations
- Book: The Little Book that Builds Wealth; Charlie Wilson’s War
- Podcast: The Indicator
- Indie Hacker: Marie Ng
Follow Michele
- Personal site
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Macgill Davis and Will Goto are the founders of Rize, a time-tracking platform that helps you increase your productivity, started in August 2020. Will and Macgill met at a company called Peer, which then got acquired by Twitter, they then left Twitter and founded a company called Humble Dot, which they raised for but unfortunately had to shut down.
What we covered in this episode:
- Working on a side project while at Twitter
- Raising funding then leaving their jobs
- Co-founders with the same technical background
- A different approach to finding a co-founder
- Shutting down a business when it’s not doing well
- Searching for a new idea and solving your own problem
- Creating a landing page and running some ads
- Picking a market to focus on
- Time tracking for productivity
- Getting traction through AppSumo
- Cash up front with lifetime deals
- Raising vs bootstrapping
- How to be more productive
Recommendations
- Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport, Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Podcast: The Rest is History/Revolutions, Masters of Scale
- Indie Hacker: Tony Dinh, Arvid Kahl
Follow
- Macgill on Twitter
- Will on Twitter
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Figura
Often great design makes products stand out in this day and age; stop trying to figure it out yourself. Figura offers vetted product designers for startups and fast-growing companies. Find your first designer or contractor, or land a helping hand for your product in less than 48hours. Save $199 and start your project for free, using code "INDIE199".
Head to figura.digital to try it out.
Milly Tamati is not your usual founder. She lives on an remote island off Scotland with a population of just 170 people, previously co-owned a hostel in Thailand, co-founded a wine-tour in Australia and founded an illustration-agency in the UK. Now she’s working on a community called generalist.world, where’s she’s helping generalists like us indie hackers, find like minded individuals and jobs that fit us well.
What we covered in this episode:
- Living on a remote island with 170 people
- Remote life vs city life
- Being isolated when not in a city
- Embracing communities
- Milly’s crazy career journey
- Getting a customer in 12 hours
- Testing your product before you launch
- Why generalists aren’t valued in the world
- Growing to 850 community members in a few months
- How to cultivate community
Recommendations
- Book - Range by David Epstein
- Podcast - Lennys Podcast
- Indie Hacker - Molly Retter
Follow Milly
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Today I’m joined by Dominik Sobe, the founder of Helpkit, a product he started last year that turns Notion pages into a professional help center, doing $4.5k MRR. In this episode we talk about Dom’s many failed projects, how he finally found something that worked with Helpkit and how he went from wanting to be a management consultant to being an indie hacker.
What we covered in this episode:
- Dom’s previous projects
- Wanting to become a management consultant
- Management consultant to indie hacker
- Making his first internet money
- Being embarrassed about your first product
- Overengineering your first product
- Building an MVP during a hackathon
- Validation before building a product
- Side projects as marketing
- Building in a growing market
- Investing in SEO
Recommendations
- Book: Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Minh-Phuc Tran
Follow Dominik
- Personal Site
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Figura
Often great design makes products stand out in this day and age; stop trying to figure it out yourself. Figura offers vetted product designers for startups and fast-growing companies. Find your first designer or contractor, or land a helping hand for your product in less than 48hours. Save $199 and start your project for free, using code "INDIE199".
Head to figura.digital to try it out.
Joe Masilotti is the founder of RailsDevs a reverse job board for Ruby on Rails developers, which is over $4k MRR and on for $100k revenue. Joe also runs the monthly Hotwire Dev newsletter, which has over 2,000 subs. And then late last year, Joe sold his side-project Mugshot Bot, which he took from idea to sale in just 14 months.
What we covered on this episode:
- How and why Joe sold Mugshot Bot at $200 MRR
- When to stop working on projects
- How RailsDevs started with a spreadsheet
- Solving a problem with a simple solution
- Why a reverse jobs board works
- A unique approach to a marketplace business
- Growing RailsDevs (from both sides)
- Being an embedded entrepreneur
- Why RailsDevs has a hiring fee and subscription
- Dealing with high churn
- Growing a newsletter to 2,300 subs
Recommendations
- Book: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
- Podcast: The Business of Authority
- Indie Hacker: Colleen Schnettler
Follow Joe
- Read his blog
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Geoff Roberts is the co-founder of Outseta, a bootstrapped all-in-one platform to help manage and grow your recurring revenue business. Before Outseta, Geoff was Head of Marketing for Buildium, a product that went through the phases of bootstrapping, raising and exiting, that was started by current co-founder Dimitris.
What we covered in this episode:
- Taking a big 15 year bet on your business
- Going into an established, durable market
- Why not raise for the company?
- Single focus vs portfolio of small bets
- Why Outseta focused on brand building and not SEO
- Marketing trade-offs
- Why freemium doesn’t work for everyone
- Building a flat, self-managed organisation
Recommendations
- Book: Reinventing Organistations; Life Profitability
- Podcast: Tim Ferris Show
- Indie Hacker: Anthony Castrio
Follow Geoff
- Read the Outseta Blog
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Figura
Often great design makes products stand out in this day and age; stop trying to figure it out yourself. Figura offers vetted product designers for startups and fast-growing companies. Find your first designer or contractor, or land a helping hand for your product in less than 48hours. Save $199 and start your project for free, using code "INDIE199".
Head to figura.digital to try it out.
David Kofoed Wind is the co-founder and CEO of Eduflow an education platform started in 2015 as Peergrade, which was a peer to peer feedback tool. David is the definition of technical, having studied for a degree in applied math and computer science, then a Ph.D in machine learning. This is where the idea for Peergrade was born, as he started teach a course in data science and solved his own problem.
👉 Extended version of this episode.
What we covered in this episode:
- How Peergrade started in 2015
- Scratching your own itch
- Selling to universities
- Using your "unfair advantages"
- Why David took a Ph.D
- What it's like building a product with a Ph.D
- Having a terrible product
- Going for and ending the VC dream
- Pivoting Peergrade to Eduflow
- Why David resonates with Indie Hackers
Recommendations
- Book: Rework by Basecamp
- Podcast: Out of Beta
- Indie Hacker: Jon Yongfook
Follow David
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
If you’re wanting to learn about building in public, Kevon Cheung is your guy. After not getting the fulfilment he desired from the VC funded startup dream, Kevon struck out on his own in 2020 to become an indie hacker. Since then he’s launched the Build in Public Mastery course, started a newsletter called Public Lab, wrote the Definitive Guide to Building in Public and then to top this all off, wrote a book called Find Joy in Choas.
What we covered in this episode:
- Building credibility
- Taking a 6 month bet
- Starting from scratch to learn a trend
- Choosing to build in public
- Anyone can learn any topic
- Is building in public just sharing MRR numbers?
- What is building in public?
- False positives of building an audience
- Building a creator business
- How to differentiate course content to blog content
- Info products vs SaaS
Recommendations:
- Book: Life Is What You Make It by Peter Buffet, $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi
- Podcast: Socialette, The Bootstrapped Founder
- Indie Hacker: Monica Lent, Jay Clouse, Marie Ng
Follow Kevon
- Personal website
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Marie Ng is the founder of Llama Life, a to-do-list app that helps you focus. As someone who struggles with focus myself, Marie’s app looked to be the perfect thing. Having taught herself how to code 2 years ago, after a career in branding, Marie did what everyone does when they learn to code, build a to do list app. But with her branding background and new quirky angle on a productivity app, she’s made it work. From a solo indie project to now raising a $690k pre-seed round, Marie is making her entrepreneurial dream happen.
👉 Extended version of this episode.
What we discussed in this episode:
- How Marie got into branding
- What is branding?
- Why indie hackers should consider their “brand”
- How to create a brand
- Building a product to help with ADHD
- Building to solve your own problem
- How to work with ADHD
- Llama Life’s brand impact
- Why Marie raised funding
Recommendations
- Book: Honest Guide to Indie Making by Kyleigh Smith
- Podcast: The Best One Yet
- Indie Hacker: Carl Poppa
Follow Marie
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Chris Frantz is the co-founder of Loops, YC backed email tool for startups. Chris is one of those people who just knows how to run a SaaS business, having founded and sold Snazzy AI, acquired by Unbounce last year. Chris has been living rent free in my brain after a conversation we had a few weeks ago about my multiple projects. A lot of you are going to have multiple projects too, and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere with them. In this episode, Chris is going to explain why.
What we cover in this episode
- Some of Chris previous bootstrapped projects
- PH profile
- How Chris started and sold Snazzy.ai
- Selling article
- Tackling email with Loops.so
- Making the chef’s knife of email
- Why you should have a single focus
- Why having a portfolio of small bets doesn’t work
- Doing the hard things
- Having hobby projects vs a business
Recommendations
- Book: Atomic Habits
- Podcast: The Vergecast
- Indie Hacker: Sahil Bloom
Follow Chris
- Personal site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Grey Baker is the co-founder of Dependabot, which is a bot that makes it easy for developers to keep the third party dependencies up to date, which grew to $14k MRR before being acquired by Github in 2019. Grey’s story is a long an interesting one, so there is an extended version of this podcast available on the indie feast membership. But the best bits are here about he started out at McKinsey, before being a pivotal early employee at London FinTech GoCardless, to then cycling around the world and then coming back to accidentally launch Dependabot.
👉 Extended version available on the Indie Feast membership here.
What we covered in this episode
- Landing a gig at consulting firm, McKinsey
- Learning how to code in 6 months
- Joining VC-backed GoCardless as employee 6
- Growing GoCardless to 100 employees
- Why Grey left after 4.5 years
- Cycling around the world
- Eating a petrol-ey snickers bar
- Starting Dependabot as a side project
- A failed launch
- Doing things that don't scale
- The growth inflection point - GitHub marketplace
- Advice for bootstrappers
Recommendations
- Book: The Design of Everyday Things
- Podcast: N/A
- Indie Hacker: Pete Hamilton
Follow Grey
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Tiiny Host
Tiiny Host is the simplest way to host and share your web project online. It's loved by thousands of freelancers, agencies & developers across the world to quickly upload demos, landing pages or websites. Just drag & drop your web files or even a PDF to share it with the world in seconds.
👉 Try it here
Ch Daniel is the co-founder of Legit Check, an app that authenticates luxury items, that grew to $6k MRR in just a few weeks. He’s also building simple.ink, which is a simple way to make a website from Notion, it got #1 product of the day and got 1,300 users in the first month. He’s also got his finger in many SaaS pies, running the r/SaaS subreddit where he arranges AMAs and facilitates discussions with some of the biggest SaaS founders out there. As for podcasting, Daniel’s dipped in there too, with his show The Usual SaaSpects an extension of his brand. Most recently, Dan acquired Emojics.com
What we covered in this episode:
- Making $200k with an authenticator business
- How does one fall into authenticating luxury items?
- How Legit Check became legit
- Turning a one-time purchase business to a subscription
- Taking over the r/SaaS community on Reddit
- Favourite AMA with Sabba and Tim from VEED
- The real reason he started his podcast, The Usual SaaSpects
- James interview on The Usual SaaSpects
- Does the world need another Notion web builder?
- Pre-launching to build a list of 5,000
- Acuiring Emojics.com
- Should more indie hackers acquire businesses?
Recommendations
- Book: Power of Now
- Podcast: Prof G Show, Succession Pod
- Indie Hacker: CH David
Follow Daniel
- Personal site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Tiiny Host
Tiiny Host is the simplest way to host and share your web project online. It's loved by thousands of freelancers, agencies & developers across the world to quickly upload demos, landing pages or websites. Just drag & drop your web files or even a PDF to share it with the world in seconds.
👉 Try it here
JR Farr is the co-founder of Make Lemonade, a product studio behind Lemon Squeezy (a platform to sell digital products), Dunked (to showcase your portfolio) and Iconic (a set of cracking looking apps). But this isn’t JR’s first foray into entrepreneurship. Back in 2008 he sold his first startup, College Connecting, before starting and selling another, MOJO marketplace back in 2012. From here he worked at the acquiring company for 5 years, before starting ANOTHER startup, called Weav, a product to help with customer retention. I could list out JR’s CV in more detail, but you can tell that this chap a seasoned entrepreneur.
What we covered in this episode:
- JR's entrepreneurship background
- Building Mojo (Wordpress marketplace)
- Mojo getting acquired in 2012
- Why JR stayed for 5 years in a big company
- Getting a mini MBA
- Spending $75k on a domain for a failed company
- Meeting the Make Lemonade folks
- Orman Clark
- Gilbert Pellegrom
- Jason Schuller
- Should more founders band together?
- Building Lemon Squeezy
- Taking on the digital products space
- Going into a crowded market
- Advice for entreprenuers
Recommendations
- Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Jon Yonfook
Follow JR
- Personal site
- Make Lemonade Podcast
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ramen Club
My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.
Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.
To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.
Dru Riley is the founder of Trends.vc which at its core helps people discover new ideas and markets through expertly researched reports. Trends is a bootstrapped company that makes money through it’s Trends Pro reports and community.
In 2017, Dru took on a mini-retirement, sold a second home and set out with 3-5 years of savings to strike out on his own. After launching various newsletters, products and even book he eventually landed on Trends, which didn’t actually make any money for the first few months. But just 6 short months later, he was at over $20k MRR and growing fast.
Now, Dru is working through the challenges of scaling a rapidly growing business and even hiring people to take over that juicy core. The reports. Here's a link to the Indie Hackers episode he did where he talks more about what went into that growth.
What we covered in this episode:
- Hiring for the core competency of the business, the reports
- What Dru’s day-to-day looks like
- Challenges with context switching
- Starting Trends for fun
- The idea behind framework based research
- The first Trends report on cloud kitchens
- How does Dru decide on topics for Trends
- Choosing to persevere with Trends
- Launching a community
- How comfort challenges led to Trends success
- When to stop projects
- What Dru does for fun
Recommendations
- Book: Sapiens, Caste
- Podcast: Founders
- Indie Hacker: Pat Walls
Follow Dru
- Personal site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Monica Lent is a founder running 3 profitable indie businesses after leaving her full time job 2 years ago. She runs Affilimate, a SaaS product which allows you to manage and track affiliate commissions, the Blogging for Devs newsletter and paid community for developers looking to grow an audience and finally, Not a Nomad, a travel blog that accounted for almost 50% of Monica’s revenue last year, as she grew her portfolio of projects from $30k to over $100k.
What we covered in this episode:
- How Monica splits time between her projects
- Is it detrimental having split attention?
- Delegating and outsourcing as an indie hacker
- How content and SEO ties her projects together
- Benefits of a VA
- Starting a blog that makes thousands
- Having a travel blog during covid
- Starting a community for developers
- How to start your own successful blog
- The downsides of sharing revenue numbers
- Is Monica having fun?
Recommendations
- Book: Founding Sales
- Podcast: Tropical MBA
- Indie Hacker: Josh Ho
Follow Monica
- 2021 Retro on personal site
- SEO Course
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Pierre De Wulf is the co-founder of ScrapingBee a web scraping API that grew to $1M ARR in 2 years. Before starting ScrapingBee, Pierre and his co-founder Kevin had quit their jobs to follow the indie dream. 9 months later, their product PricingBot couldn’t generate the traction they were hoping for so they sold the business and pivoted to ScrapingBee.
What we covered in this episode:
- Pierre's background; inspiration from his father
- Running a business within World of Warcraft
- Meeting his co-founder, Kevin
- Starting a project for his girlfriend
- Leaving his job to work on something for 9 months
- Knowing when to stop and move on
- Starting and selling PricingBot
- How to sell a failed company
- Using SEO as a marketing channel
- How to write SEO content effectively
- Starting ScrapingBee
- How ScrapingBee grew so quickly
- Taking TinySeed funding
Recommendations
- Book: Hello Startup
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Matt Wensing
Follow Pierre
- Personal site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Damon Chen, who is the founder of Testimonial, a product that collects video testimonials that he launched back in December 2020, and has grown it to $13k MRR since then. Damon quit his stable job of 8 years at Cisco to pursue his dream of building a better life for himself as an indie hacker. This didn’t come easily for Damon, as he launched several products which made 0 revenue before hitting big with Testimonial. He’s also built some other fantastic products, such as embed.so and channel.so, as well as acquiring Supportman off fellow Indie Hacker Noah Bragg.
What we covered in this episode:
- Damon's failed startup attempts
- Why he builds for fun
- Quitting his job and pivoting to Testimonial
- Using code from other projects
- How he went from 0 to 3k in 3 days
- Damon's approach to validation
- Growth tactics used to get to $13k MRR
- Having other projects for fun (Embed and Channel)
- Acquiring Supportman
- Growing his Twitter to 30k
Recommendations
- Book: Getting Acquired
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels
Follow Damon
- Damon's blog
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - PodQueue
This podcast is brought to you by PodQueue. Don't you hate when you find something you just want to bookmark and listen to later as a podcast, but there's no easy way to do it? Try PodQueue, and you can save audio from anywhere around the web and easily listen to it later in the podcast app you already use. PodQueue works with links from YouTube, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, NPR, the BBC, and more! There’s a 15-day free trial, and it’s just $5 per month afterwards, with no credit card required at signup. Use promo code “INDIEBITES” at signup to get an extra month free!
👉 Try it here
Dominic Monn is the founder of MentorCruise, a marketplace that connect mentors and mentees in Tech, which is currently doing $15k in monthly revenue and processed over $1m through the platform. Previously, Domm was a Machine Learning engineer at Doist, a job that he left in Feb '22 to pursue MentorCruise full time.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Dom left his full-time job at Doist
- How going full-time has impacted MentorCruise
- What Dom’s day-to-day looks like
- Not feeling guilty about unproductive hobbies
- How Dom’s discovered mentorship through Udacity
- Taking 5 months to build an MVP
- Why validation wouldn’t work for MentorCruise
- How it took 3 months to get his first paying customer
- Why he decided to push through regardless
- How persistence pays off
- Why building a business is like building a muscle
- How programmatic SEO works
Recommendations
- Book: Built to Sell
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Julian Canlas
Follow Dom
- Hire him as a mentor
- Personal site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Today I’m joined by Spencer Fry, founder of Podia, a platform helping creators make a living online through selling courses, digital downloads, webinars and more. 7 years in, they have a 35 person team and have an awesome product for creators. But this isn’t Spencer’s first rodeo, bootstrapping and exiting 3 businesses between 2003 and 2014, notably Carbonmade and TypeFrag. What’s interesting about Spencer is that he's actually raised funding for Podia, and I wanted to find out why a seasoned bootstrapper like Spencer went down this route, and if it’s a an option that more indie hackers should consider.
👉 50 minute version of this conversation.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Spencer raised funding for Podia
- Why you should look at funding as a tool
- Beer ≠ funding
- 3 interesting predictions on the creator economy
- Spencer’s article with those predictions
- Bonus: Spencer’s famous vodka pasta dish
- Opportunities to build in the creator economy
- Why entrepreneurs are different gravy
- Solo founder vs co-founder
Recommendations
- Book: Ben Horowitz Book 1 / Book 2
- Podcast: Axios Today / All In Pod
- Indie Hacker / entrepreneur: Tobi Lutke
Follow Spencer
- Personal Blog
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Dagobert Renouf is the founder of Logoloy, a logo and brand design service that he started with his wife, doing around $3k in monthly revenue. This is an awesome story. Dago started building Logoloy in September 2018, then completely failed the launch after building for almost 2 years. It wasn't until May 21 that Dago realised he actually needed to find a marketing channel that worked for him -which was Twitter. Dago went for 15 years chasing money, but then realised that wasn’t the course to happiness. So after a turbulent few years, he’s now in a place of fulfilment, with plenty of the journey to go.
👉 Extended episode here.
What we covered in this episode:
- Making his first internet money in high school
- Getting a cease and desist at 15 years old
- The dangers of being focused on money
- Finding the idea for Logology
- Taking 1.5 years to launch his startup
- Having a failed launch after 1.5 years of building
- Marketing when you don’t want to do marketing
- Discovering a distribution channel that works - Twitter
- Growing to $3k per month
Recommendations
- Book: Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- Podcast: Wannabe Entreprenuer
- Indie Hacker: Tony Dihn
Follow Dago
- Logology
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Jim Raptis, an indie hacker from Greece who is working full-time on his portfolio of projects, including BrandBird and Magic Pattern, which are both doing $1,500 MRR. If you’ve seen those cool screenshots on Twitter with the nice drop shadow and gradient background, those are made with Brand Bird.
What we covered in this episode
- Quitting running a funded startup for indie hacking
- Earning that first dollar
- Learning design as an engineer
- Launching a product with less than 300 followers
- Choosing to do a portfolio of small bets
- Splitting time between multiple projects
- How Jim went grew from 300 to 9k Twitter followers
- What do to do when things aren’t going so well
Recommendations
- Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
- Podcast: Flow State
- Indie Hacker: Peter Levels
Follow Jim
- Personal Site
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Testimonial
Testimonial allows you to easily collect testimonials from your customers and automatically embeds them on your landing page.
You might have seen a wall of love with a bunch of supportive Tweets and videos on various products you’ve signed up for. That wall is created using Damon Chen’s product Testimonial. All you have to do is sign up, paste the nice things people have said about you and it will generate a beautiful set of testimonials that you can easily embed on your site or share online.
Head to Testimonial.to o to create your Twitter wall of love for free. If you want to sign up for a paid plan, get a whopping 25% off for 12 months with the code “INDIEBITES” at checkout.
In this episode I’ve got my first ever returning guest with Dianna Allen and first ever double act as we’re joined by her fiance Jeremy Blalock. I spoke to Dianna about a year ago after growing her handmade candle business from $100 to $50k in that year. Since then Dianna is still running TERRA and doubled the revenue in 2021, but has also co-founded Inventora which has just hit $5k MRR. Inventora is inventory tracking system for handmade businesses, solving Dianna’s own problem with TERRA.
👉 Join the Indie Feast membership here.
What we covered in this episode:
- How TERRA is going
- Handmade business vs SaaS business. Which is better?
- Solving her own problem with TERRA to build Inventora
- Spreadsheet to SaaS
- Asking Jeremy (Dianna’s partner) to build the product
- Growing without paying for ads
- Leveraging existing relationships
- Choosing to raise a small funding round
- Why raise money if you’re an indie hacker?
- Spending $25,000 on a domain
- Tactics for growing to $5k MRR
- Hiring a videographer to make a documentary
Recommendations
- Books: The Innovation Stack, The Gardeners Almanack
- Podcasts: Acquired, The Product Boss
- Indie Hackers: Elon Musk, Jon Yongfook
Follow Dianna & Jeremy
- Dianna's Twitter
- Jeremy's Twitter
- Inventora Instagram
- TERRA Instagram
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad, the platform that allows creators to sell products online. The beating heart of the creator economy. You'll likely have heard Sahil's story about his failure to build a billion dollar company with an article that went viral, but let me summarise for those that haven't.
Sahil founded Gumroad in 2011, aiming to build the next unicorn, leaving Pinterest where he was employee #2. He raised $1.1m from angels, then $7m more in 2012. Things started growing, then they didn't. Sahil laid off 75% of the company to keep the product alive, moved to Provo, Utah to figure where to take Gumroad from that point. Almost a decade later Gumroad is growing quicker than ever, making millions in revenue and helping creators make a living online.
Sahil has just launched his book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, where he shares a decade of learnings on how to build a profitable, sustainable business and how entrepreneurs can do more with less to make more impact on the world.
👉 I'm giving away 5 copies of Sahil's book on Twitter, enter here.
What we covered on this episode:
- Sahil’s approach to funding
- Bootstrapping vs VC
- Why Gumroad runs so differently to most companies
- Why longevity has helped Gumroad
- Sahil’s book: The Minimalist Entrepreneur
- Building a project in a weekend: Verification Letters
- Livestream of building Verification Letters
- The framework for starting a business
- Why you should start and then learn
- Barriers people have to starting their business
- Fear of failure
- Importance of writing
Recommendations
- Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Podcast: All-In Podcast
- Indie Hacker: Naval
Follow Sahil
- Website
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - ilo Analytics
Sahil has 280k followers on Twitter and he sure knows the tweets that will engage his audience. If you too want to get a deeper understanding of what engages your followers on Twitter, you should check out ilo Analytics.
ilo helps you easily see which kind of tweets get more impressions, likes, profile clicks and more so you can get grow your Twitter audience. ilo's has beautiful graphs for the most important metrics for both tweets and threads will be sure to help you build your following.
Head to ilo.soor hit the link in the show notes and use the code INDIEBITES to get 25% off your ilo subscription for life.
Brett Williams is the founder of Designjoy, a one-man productised design service that is doing over $130k MRR, charging clients up to $5k a month for unlimited design. You indeed hear that right, Brett is running a million dollar business solo with over 40 clients.
What we covered in this episode:
- $50k per year with a Tumblr blog
- Dropping out of college and getting a regular job
- How Brett started Designjoy
- Being inspired by Design Pickle
- Launching Designjoy
- Taking 3 years to get to $10k MRR
- Non-traditional marketing and growth methods
- Launching Scribbles, a side project
- What does into a good landing page?
- Different routes to success
- Waiting till $80k to quit his job
- Should entrepreneurs be more risk-adverse?
- How run a successful 1-man productised service?
Recommendations
- Book: Company of One
- Podcast: The Dave Ramsey Show
- Indie Hacker: Suhail
Follow Brett
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Val Hinov is the founder of Thankbox an online group card tool that grew to $20k p/m throughout lockdown. Now Val is facing the challenges of what to do when your product scales, what to do when the wave that brought you success starts to slow and when your product has one-time purchase pricing model.
What we covered in this episode:
- Where the idea for Thankbox came from?
- Lessons learned from a failed startup
- How he built Thankbox in 2 months
- How he got his first users for Thankbox
- Building a virality model
- Using Google Ads to grow quickly
- Advice for people apprehensive of using ads
- Why social ads didn’t work
- The effect of a one-off purchase pricing model
- Having a big drop in users
- Indie Hackers Pod
- The seasonality of online cards
- Outsourcing vs solo
- When to go full-time
Recommendations
- Book: Atomic Habits
- Podcast: The Revolutions Podcast
- Indie Hacker: Andrea Bosoni
Follow Val
- PersonalSite
- Thankbox
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - 4dayweek.io
As indie hackers we’re always trying to squeeze extra hours in our day to work on our side projects. What about if you had a whole extra day to work on your projects, while still getting a full-time salary?
4dayweek.io is the place to get a Software Job with a better work-life balance. All jobs have a 4 day work week contract and most are only 32 hours per week. Find the best remote tech jobs from companies with a great work-life balance at 4dayweek.io or hit the link in the show notes.
👉 Try it here.
Che Sampat is an 18 year old Indie Hacker who built SuperPay in 2019 when he was 15 years old, an app that lets you generate easy payment links through Stripe and Square. Since then he's grown it to 5k users, $6k in revenue and processed a whopping $15m in payments. Che has also been working at some cool companies since he was young, recently joining the payments startup Fast to focus on his career, therefore stepping back from SuperPay.
What we covered in this episode
- How Che got into coding
- Building his first app in year 9 computer science
- How Che learnt to code with YouTube
- The story of building SuperPay
- Starting his first company at 15
- Balancing indie hacking and school
- Success without idea validation
- Launching on Product Hunt with no plan
- How did Che get his first users
- Growing to $15m GMV
- Did Che buy himself anything nice?
- Getting in trouble with Stripe building SuperPortal
- Challenges of being an 18yr old indie hacker
- Why Che got himself an engineering job instead of pursuing SuperPay
Recommendations
- Book: Clean Code
- Podcast: Software Engineering Daily
- Indie Hacker: Peter Grillet
Follow Che
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Reel.so
Reel lets you create these short teaser videos (called audiograms), with animated subtitles, waveforms and a ton of beautiful templates to choose from. Save time and set your podcast clips aside from the rest by creating these sharable snippets that grab your audience's attention as they scroll through their feed. even without sound.
I've used Reel myself for Indie Bites and it's been a game changer for me. If you want to give it a go for yourself, head to reel.so or click the link in your show notes and use the code INDIEBITES for 20% off.
👉 Try it here.
In this episode we’re joined by Tom Ross, who is the founder of Design Cuts, a marketplace and community for creatives which he’s grown to a team of 20 over the past decade. Tom is also a seasoned podcaster, co-hosting The Honest Designer's Show and Biz Buds which have been downloaded millions of times.
It's not all been plain sailing for Tom as he ran into severe burnout working 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 18 months, leading to him being hospitalised. In this episode we're going to find out more about Tom's story, some of his successes and failures in business, along advice he'd give to founders from his experiences.
👉 Get the extended version of this podcast on membership, available for £4 a month.
What we covered in this episode:
- Tom’s backstory
- Link to pod episode
- Starting an Interpol forum
- Earning more money at home at 16 than in his job
- Growing a design blog to 15 million visitors
- Growing Design Cuts in the early days
- 10 years later, 20 employees, millions of revenue
- Mental health and burnout as a founder
- Link to Tom’s burnout story
- How to build good routines to avoid burnout
- How community can help with your mental health
- Why community is so important
- How to build a community
Recommendations
- Book: Thank You Economy by Gary Vee
- Podcast: Diary of a CEO
- Indie Hacker: Rosie Sherry
Follow Tom
- Website
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Marie Martens the co-founder of Tally, an easy way to create forms online. She left her stable marketing job to start Tally with her partner in crime Filip and became an indie hacker. Since then they've grown Tally to over 16,000 users almost $10k MRR as they work towards becoming default alive. Through a mix of manual prospecting, a successful product hunt launch and product-led growth, they’ve turned Tally into an exceptional indie success story.
-> Subscribe to my brand new podcast, No More Mondays, co-hosted with Dan Rowden here.
What we covered in this episode:
- The origin story of Tally
- Indie Hackers episode
- A failed startup, Hotspot
- How COVID crushed their first startup
- How Tally got their first few users
- Doing things that don’t scale
- How I became Tally’s first paying customer
- Biggest source of sign ups for tally
- The benefits of product-led growth
- How to do an effective PH launch
- Going from 3,000 - 12,000 users without paid ads
- Why Marie quit her job to bootstrap
- Would she ever go back to a job
- What it’s like building your dream startup
Recommendations
- Book: Intercom on Marketing
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Davis Baer
Follow Marie
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad, a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, Matt has been on quite the journey with Astropad and we’re going to dive into all of that today, along with a mini-masterclass on PR.
What we covered in this episode:
- Origins of Astropad
- Having two technical co-founders
- How they tackled marketing with no prior knowledge
- Most useful books to learn the basics
- 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
- Burned Out Blogger's Guide to PR
- How Matt leveraged PR in the early days
- How indie hackers can use PR for their projects
- Size of Astropad in 2022
- Why they built a hardware product
- How to get into building hardware
- The benefits of hardware products
- How Apple stole their product
- How they saved their business after being crushed by Apple
Recommendations
- Book: Radical Candour, The Making of a Manager
- Podcast: Dithering
- Indie Hacker: Monica Lent
Follow Matt
- Astropad Podcast
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
Ben Orenstein is the founder of Tuple, a tool for remote pair programmers that has been steadily growing for the past few years. Now, Ben runs Tuple with a small team and is delving into what happens when your SaaS starts to hit scale. You might have also heard Ben's voice on the Art of Product podcast, which he co-hosts with Derrick Reimer, founder of SavvyCal, talking about the behind the scenes of running their respective SaaS companies.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Tuple is the most successful product he’s made
- How Ben’s approach to enterprise sales has changed
- How much revenue comes from enterprise sales
- How the enterprise product is differentiated
- How indie hackers can sell to bigger companies
- Where Tuple gets it’s customers from
- What does Ben’s day-to-day look like?
- Has he just built himself a job?
- The benefits of making a podcast
- Some of Ben’s favourite previous products
Recommendations
- Book: The Mom Test
- Podcast: Bootstrapped Web
- Indie Hacker: Adam Wathan
Follow Ben
- Blog
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Fathom Analytics
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.
This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.
Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.
Link → https://usefathom.com/bites
Today I’m joined by Kenneth Cassel the founder of Pointer.gg a product he pivoted from Slip.so, a course platform making it easy for developers to make high-quality interactive courses. He got inspiration for Slip when he built vim.so, a course made $10k in just one month with - his first internet money. It's not all been plain sailing for Kenneth, as he struggled with failing his way to eventual success, with 4 years building products with no revenue. Now with Slip, he's quit his job, been accepted to YC and gets to build a company he’s always wanted to have.
What we covered in this episode:
- How buying a Raspberry Pi changed Kenneth's life
- Going from maintenance man for a gas station to software engineer
- The inspiration Kenneth took from his Dad
- How he learned programming
- Making $100 in 4 years of side projects
- How to stay motivated when things aren't going so well
- Going from 0-20k Twitter followers
- How building in public impacted Kenneth
- Earning $10k in one month with Vim.so
- Why he started Slip.so
- Dealing with imposter syndrome
Recommendations
- Book: Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: The Builder JR
Follow Kenneth
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Fathom Analytics
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.
This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.
Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.
Link → https://usefathom.com/bites
Peter Suhm is the co-founder of Reform, a tool that lets you easily create simple, brandable forms. Peter is also part of the Tiny Seed 1st batch, where he was working on a product called branch Branch. After that didn't work out, he went through a period of testing and validating ideas.
One of those ideas was a investor update tool, where Peter discovered how convoluted creating a form with existing tools was. Using Twitter and a very early stage MVP, he validated the idea for Reform and got to work building.
Since then he's had #1 Product of the Week on Product Hunt and is now working through the challenges of building features and growing revenue. You might have also heard Peter on the Out of Beta podcast, which he co-hosts with Matt Wensing.
➡️ Get the uncut, 30 minute conversation with Peter on the Indie Bites membership here.
What we covered in this episode:
- Coming up with the idea for Reform
- Validating the idea for Reform
- Why build a product in such a competitive market
- Where form builders keep messing up
- Getting to #1 Product Hunt of the week
- When is the right time to launch on PH
- Marketing and growth tests for Reform going forward
- Continuing to try things that don't scale
- Where should founders start with marketing?
- Peter's approach to product development
- The feedback loop of Twitter
- The upsides of raising Tiny Seed money
Recommendations
- Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
- Podcast: Tropical MBA
- Indie Hacker: Derrick Reimer
Follow Peter
- Personal Site
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Fathom Analytics
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.
This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.
Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.
Link → https://usefathom.com/bites
Brian Casel is a veteran of the bootstrapping game, having left his full-time job back in 2008. You might have heard him on the Boostrapped Web podcast where he shares his journey starting and building software products. Over the years Brian has pretty much done it all, built software businesses, courses, productized services and even sold some along the way. Most recently, Brian has been working on ZipMessage, a new way to communicate asynchronously.
➡️ Get the uncut, 60 minute recording with Brian on the Indie Feast membership here.
What we covered in this episode:
- Where did the idea of ZipMessage come from?
- How Brian validated ZipMessage
- Brian's unconventional approach to validation
- Why Brian raised funding from Calm Company Fund
- How can people go from freelancer to productized service
- The importance of building processes in productized services
- Why Brian didn't follow his passion for music
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
- Podcast: Smartless
- Indie Hacker: James McKinven (errm...)
Follow Brian
- Personal Site
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Fathom Analytics
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.
This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.
Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.
Link → https://usefathom.com/bites
In 2019 Daniel Vassallo left his $500k salaried job at Amazon to go indie. In the 2 years since he left Daniel has placed many small bets, something he's become known for. In particular Daniel has seen success from his Info Products and building his audience on Twitter, which has grown from 0 to 91k. He wrote a short book on the good parts of AWS, which has made $126,000, then following the Twitter growth, wrote a book called Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience, which has made $244,000. He shares all of his revenue reports in his Profit and Loss community, which in itself has made over $30k in the past year. In total, and in just over 2 years, Daniel has made $570k in revenue and $306k in profit since leaving his job at Amazon. But he's gained something he didn't have while working for someone else, freedom.
➡️ Get the uncut, 80 minute recording with Daniel on the Indie Feast membership here.
What we covered in this episode:
- Leaving a $500k job at Amazon to go Indie
- The trap of judging your life based on financial value
- Why the initial focusing on one product didn't work out for Daniel
- Where the small bets mindset originated
- How to deal with context switching with small bets
- Dealing with an uncertain income
- Why info products work well for a small bets strategy
- How book publishers work and how we can apply their methods
- The importance of the "small" in small bets
- How you can build a twitter audience like Daniel
- Why Daniel started making wooden cutting boards
- How he made $2,600 from one tweet
Recommendations
- Book: Anti Fragile by Nassim Taleb
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Peter Askew
More on Daniel
- On the IH pod
- His most popular articles
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
Sponsor - Fathom Analytics
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.
This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.
Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.
Link → https://usefathom.com/bites
Harry Morton is the founder of Lower Street Media, a podcast production agency that specialises in premium podcasts for ambitious companies. Lower Street are the agency behind top shows such as Secret Leaders, Technology Untangled and WFH Daily. Harry's business has skyrocketed since COVID, doubling in size of revenue and headcount in the last 6-months as more companies start to realise how effective podcasting can be. Harry also runs Single Track Conf, a 3-day mountain-biking founder retreat.
➡️ Here's my course on starting a podcast in 2 hours or less (use "bites" for $10 off)
What we covered in this episode:
- Why start an agency? it's not exactly a dream business to start.
- How Harry grew Lowerstreet through cold outreach
- 1st client, Ultimate Leadership Podcast
- Why the productising model didn't work out for Lowerstreet
- What Harry did in the early days for growth
- How losing 30% of revenue was a catalyst for growth
- Doubling the agency revenue in 6 months
- Quitting his job with no savings to start Lowersteet
- Not knowing what to do when starting the company
- Addressing shiny object syndrome
- Why focus vs portfolio of projects argument is BS
- The secret sauce for making a sh*t hot podcast
- How to make a show that stands out
- Starting a mountain bike community
Recommendations
- Book: Out on The Wire by Jessica Abel
- Podcast: Startup
- Indie Hacker: Andrew Wilkinson
Follow Harry
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor - 2 Hour Podcast
Yes, that's right, I'm sponsoring my own show 🤯
After producing hundreds of podcasts for myself and clients, I've been pouring all of my knowledge into my new course, 2 Hour Podcast, which shows you how to start, grow and monetize a podcast that takes you less than 2 hours per week.
I know lots of people who want to start a pod and reap the rewards, but struggle to find the time, which is exactly why I made this course.
I've taken a three-pronged approach to making a podcast efficiently. The first is a step-by-step video guide to creating your show, covering everything from branding, to editing to hosting. The second part is a 90 minute tutorial where I make a my own podcast completely from scratch, recording the first episode with Arvid Kahl, using the tips from part 1. The final prong is my full Notion system for creating my show, including my episode CRM, guest and outreach templates, plus an episode briefing doc.
Head to 2hourpodcast.com to get the full course and get $10 off with the code "bites" at checkout.
Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, started with Paul Jarvis in 2019. Jack handles the technical side of the business, but isn't afraid to get on the mic on their podcast, Above Board, or send out some spicy tweets. Jack also runs the Serverless Laravel course, which he launched back in 2020. After this conversation Jack has turned into a true friend, speaking with me for several hours after, a genuinely nice chap. You’re going to want the same thing after listening to this pod. Jack talks with great wisdom on how to approach bootstrapping a SaaS company and taking on a huge incumbent.
➡️ Here's my course on starting a podcast in 2 hours or less (use "bites" for $10 off)
What we covered in this episode:
- What is Fathom Analytics
- Joining as a co-founder after the company was founded
- How Fathom started
- How did they know Fathom was going to work
- What growth tactics did Fathom use to grow?
- How did they convince people to pay for analytics?
- The trade-off of free software
- How do you compete in a market with a huge incumbent
- Starting a medium competitor, Pico
- Benefits of having a co-founder
- Quitting a job for Jack's first side-project
- Starting a course (Serverless Laravel) that made $150,000
Recommendations
- Book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Podcast: Huberman Lab
- Indie Hacker: N/A
Follow Jack
- Spicy Tweets
- Personal Website
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor - Part Time Tech Jobs
Thank you to my friend Charlie from Weekend Club for sponsoring this episode, with his new project Part Time Tech Jobs, which is a fantastic site for finding and posting, you guessed it, part time tech jobs
If you’re looking to transistion from a full-time role to indie hacking, finding a part time role might be just the thing for you to de-risk that transition. And on the other side, if you’re looking to hire great entrepreneurial talent without breaking the bank, this is where you should post.
So if you’re looking for a part time tech job, head to parttimetechjobs.co or if you’re looking for tech talent, use the code INDIEBITES for 80% off all featured posts.
Pete runs No CS Degree, among other things, sharing stories of people who have made it as a developer, without going down the traditional route of getting a computer science degree, showing how it's possible to earn a nice salary without going to university. He has also started High Signal, a community for revenue verified entrepreneurs, a site for finding fully remote companies and finally made 2 courses where you'll learn how to both monetize and grow your newsletter.
➡️ Here's my course on starting a podcast in 2 hours or less.
What we covered in this episode
- Pete's crazy backstory
- How he got into entreprenuership
- Most inspiring story from No CS Degree
- How does Pete get revenue
- Getting a sponsor for a course
- How do you grow a newsletter
- Launching a monetize your newsletter course
- Doing a bundle deal with other indie hackers
- Starting the High Signal community
- Why some paid communities are bad
- Pete's nifty pricing trick
- Launching a job board
Recommendations
- Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Lachlan Kirkwood
Follow Pete
- Website
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to this episode's sponsor, Churnkey
It can be a huge challenge to keep churn down when your SaaS product starts to see traction. The founders of Churnkey know exactly how much of a challenge this can be, having collectively grown three SaaS companies to over $4m in ARR.
They realized that they were thinking about cancellations all wrong. A relationship with a customer doesn’t stop with the “Cancel” button. So they built Churnkey, which reduces churn by up to 42% with custom cancellation flows. For every customer who clicks “Cancel,” Churnkey offers up dynamic offers that encourage customers to stay subscribed.
Just connect Stripe and plug in a small bit of code. In minutes, you’ll be reducing churn by immediately unlocking subscription pauses, dynamic offers, and cancellation insights.
See how much revenue Churnkey can recover for you. Visit churnkey.co to start your free trial.
Mike Slaats is the founder of Upvoty, an instant feedback software which has recently hit $17k MRR. Mike also runs the SaaS pirates community, where he talks all about running a SaaS company. Previously, he scaled Vindy, an only marketplace for home development to 1m ARR in 5 years.
What we covered in this episode
- Why did you start Upvoty?
- Stopping a $1m business to start from scratch
- Why your work should be fulfilling
- Should you be passionate about your audience?
- How to validate your idea
- How Mike got his first customers for Upvoty
- The value of an MVP and a landing page
- Why you should build runway or have an alternative income source
- How you can make your own luck
- Why indie hackers should build a personal brand
- Mike's one bit of advice for founders; validate
- How to build an MVP with the BML framework
Recommendations
- Book: Intercom on Marketing
- Podcast: How I Built This
- Indie Hacker: Arvid Kahl
Follow Mike
- YouTube
- SaaS Pirates
- Upvoty
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Noah Bragg is an indie hacker in its truest form. Building in public hacking away on his project, Potion, which is a a way to host your Notion pages as websites behind a custom domain. He's also the co-host of the Product Journey podcast, where he speaks with his co-host Ben about their progress on their respective side projects.
What we covered:
- The goal of building a huge business
- Project: Coffee Pass
- When to decide to stop a project
- Failing after 2 years working on something
- First project as an indie hacker: Supportman
- Selling Supportman
- Starting Potion
- $250 to $3,000 MRR in 4 months
- How to do a successful product hunt launch
- How to get a product hunt maker grant
- Focusing on product instead of marketing
- Finding the right market / a growing market
- Dealing with competition
Recommendations
- Book: ReWork
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Kenneth Cassel
Follow Noah
- Potion
- Website
- Product Journey Podcast
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor - Upvoty
Do you want to build the best product possible? Then listening to user feedback is one of the best ways to do so. Because by listening to the problems of your users, you can build a real problem-solver that they'll love.
Upvoty is a user feedback tool that gives your user's a voice and makes it really easy at the same time for you to prioritize what to build next. By installing Upvoty's feedback boards, you'll have all of your user feedback in one central place and it will really help you connect with your customers and understand their needs. On top of that, you can close the feedback loop by setting up your Changelog and Product Roadmap. Your users will be actively involved in building new features and will love you for that.
Try Upvoty 14-days for free and with the code 'INDIEBITES' you'll get a 10% discount on any of their plans.
Sign up here.
Andy Cloke is the founder of Data Fetcher, a platform for running API requests in Airtable, which is currently doing around $3k MRR. Andy has started many projects in the past, his most recent one, Influence Grid, was sold for $55k back in mid-2020, having only started it 7 months before. In this episode we talk about his framework for finding trending ideas, building a product and being successful with marketing as a developer. We also talk about the process of selling your product and how to make that go smoothly.
What we covered
- Andy's background
- Kabooshi
- Why Andy started Influence Grid
- How to leverage Exploding Topics to find trending ideas
- Getting validation for your idea
- Using cold outreach to grow a platform
- Rocket Reach
- Doing SEO from the start
- How he grew Influence Grid to $3k MRR
- Why decide to sell Influence Grid?
- Should you go through a platform for an acquisition?
- How to best prepare for a small acquisition
- What Andy bought himself after selling for $55k
- What he did after the acquisition
- The process of finding a new idea
- Software Ideas by Kevin Conti
- Micro SaaS by Tyler Tringas
- Why Andy started Data Fetcher
- How Data Fetcher has grown to $3k MRR
- Andy's framework for finding a successful idea
- How to push through when things aren't going so well
Recommendations
- Book: Blue Ocean Strategy
- Podcast: Startup to Last
- Indie Hacker: Jon Yongfook
Follow Andy
- Data Fetcher
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor - Upvoty
Do you want to build the best product possible? Then listening to user feedback is one of the best ways to do so. Because by listening to the problems of your users, you can build a real problem-solver that they'll love.
Upvoty is a user feedback tool that gives your user's a voice and makes it really easy at the same time for you to prioritize what to build next. By installing Upvoty's feedback boards, you'll have all of your user feedback in one central place and it will really help you connect with your customers and understand their needs. On top of that, you can close the feedback loop by setting up your Changelog and Product Roadmap. Your users will be actively involved in building new features and will love you for that.
Try Upvoty 14-days for free and with the code 'INDIEBITES' you'll get a 10% discount on any of their plans.
Sign up here.
Baird is a 4x SaaS founder based in Charleston, SC. His background is in sales, marketing, and support. He bootstrapped and grew two SaaS companies to over $1M in ARR. When he isn't working on Churnkey's sales and marketing, he is on the water with his wife and daughter.
What we covered in this episode:
- The big challenges faced when bootstrapping
- Did Baird always want to bootstrap
- Why leave a job to start a company
- Did he ever get funding from utalk
- How did Waave come about?
- How to avoid quitting when times get tough
- Getting early customers in for Waave
- What was different when they launched Zubtitle (108k MRR)
- Why they started a new business completely
- Why churn is such a difficult problem to solve
- Is it harder or easier to do B2C vs B2B
- How to manage context switching
- How to make time to run 3 huge businesses at once
Recommendations
- Book: Range by David Epstien
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Nathan Barry
Follow Baird
- Churnkey
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor - Upvoty
Do you want to build the best product possible? Then listening to user feedback is one of the best ways to do so. Because by listening to the problems of your users, you can build a real problem-solver that they'll love.
Upvoty is a user feedback tool that gives your user's a voice and makes it really easy at the same time for you to prioritize what to build next. By installing Upvoty's feedback boards, you'll have all of your user feedback in one central place and it will really help you connect with your customers and understand their needs. On top of that, you can close the feedback loop by setting up your Changelog and Product Roadmap. Your users will be actively involved in building new features and will love you for that.
Try Upvoty 14-days for free and with the code 'INDIEBITES' you'll get a 10% discount on any of their plans.
Sign up here.
Blake Emal is the CMO at Copy.ai, but it's not been a traditional route into that role. 8 years ago Blake was living in the South of France and when he moved back to the US, he had no idea what he wanted to do. As he spoke French, he landed a gig in the French team of an SEO firm. This was his first foray into marketing and he didn't intend to stay in marketing.
Fast forward 7 years of working for agencies, freelancing and in-house, he stumbled across a little tool called Copy.ai. He was quite happy in his current role, but sent the Copy.ai founder a DM on Twitter, asking if he needed any help with marketing. After a few back and forths and a grand total of 3 Zoom calls, Blake became CMO at Copy.ai.
In this episode we cover:
- What is copy.ai and how does it work?
- What does being a CMO in public mean?
- Where should founders start with marketing
- Why you should just "put a camera in front of you" when building
- Why is building in public so effective?
- Who is building in public well?
- How to get good at Twitter?
- Who is doing Twitter well?
- Are threads dead?
- Why do marketers ruin everything?
Recommendations
- Book: Lord of the Flies
- Podcast: Creator Lab
- Indie Hacker: Bereket
Follow Blake
- Luma
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor
Thank you to Dan Rowden for sponsoring this episode with his product, ilo which helps you easily see which kind of tweets get more impressions, likes, profile clicks and more so you can get grow your Twitter audience. Use the code "INDIEBITES27" for 25% off your plan for life.
Sign up here.
Listen to the full conversation here on Stefan's podcast.
This is about 17 minutes of a recording with my friend Stefan on his Founder Hot Seat podcast, which is a show that explores the real challenges that founders have in their business and how to overcome them.
I've had a ton of messages from people after listening to my previous bonus episode where I explained some of the challenges I've had with mental health over the past few months, and this episode was super helpful for me to navigate some of those challenges and set a path forward.
From Stefan
This episode is a twist on the normal format. James has publicly shared the challenges he's been going through with his mental health.
We explore the journey James has been on over the past year, including when things began to change, what that felt like on a day-to-day basis, how James has worked on his recovery and how he plans to move forward.
Follow Stefan
- Talk To Stefan
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Justin Jackson is the co-founder of Transistor.fm, a successful bootstrapped podcast hosting company. The journey building Transistor were documented on the Build Your SaaS podcast, which is a must listen. Justin is the founder of the MegaMaker community which he started in 2013, so if you're part of the maker sphere - you'll probably have heard of him.
In this episode we cover:
- What is Transistor and why did they start it
- Why work in podcast hosting? Was it not already a solved problem?
- How did they get the first few customers?
- What's next for Transistor?
- What's it like having "made it" as an indie hacker?
- What challenges does Justin run into?
- Should you just get a job at a tech company or run your bootstrapped co?
- Why bootstrapping is not a level playing field
- When you should quit your job
- Addressing mental health as an entreprenuer
Recommendations
- Book: Life Profitability
- Podcast: Software Social
- Indie Hacker: Derek Sivers
Follow Justin
- Blog
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Sponsor
Thank you to Dan Rowden for sponsoring this episode with his product, ilo which helps you easily see which kind of tweets get more impressions, likes, profile clicks and more so you can get grow your Twitter audience. Use the code "INDIEBITES27" for 25% off your plan for life.
Sign up here.
Ben Stokes a full stack developer and entrepreneur based in Bristol in the UK, who's started an ice cream business and cookie dough business amongst other things. Ben, like many indie hackers, has a bunch of small side project ideas, but not enough time to do them. So he started Tiny Projects. Tiny Projects documents his progress with these small ideas, launching 6 projects since May last year, including One Item Store, which he sold, and his most recent, Mailoji, which has just crossed $10k in revenue.
Sponsor
Thank you to today's sponsor, VEED.io, who are hiring developers, designers, product people and more. So if you're looking to join a growing bootstrapper-friendly business, reach out to their CEO, Sabba (s@veed.io), or take a look at their published roles here.
Get ad-free and extended conversations of the podcast with Indie Feast membership, for just £4 a month.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Ben started an ice cream business
- Buying an ice cream machine for £700 after a few pints
- Growing a cookie dough business to £13k a month
- Why Ben started Tiny Projects
- The six projects he's worked on
- How to sell a project for $5,000, that only made $2
- Selling $10k of emoji domain names
- How to go viral on hacker news
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog
- Podcast: Product Journey
- Indie Hacker: Alex West
Follow Ben
- Tiny Projects
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
I've never really understood mental health, or those who have had these challenges in the past. So when I've had my own challenges, I've struggled to comprehend what has been happening to me. This episode is hopefully an interesting insight into how I've been feeling over the past few months to hopefully help others who might be going through a similar thing.
Here's some things I talk about:
- Where I've been
- Overworking
- What went wrong
- Why I didn't notice a problem
- Why family and friends are so important
- The supportive indie hacker community
- YouTube videos are hard
- Burnout / depression are real shitty
- My future plans
- How I'm going to get out of this mess
I mentioned in the pod I'd been making videos about my motorbike, here's a few links if you'd like to watch:
- Here's the YouTube channel, Monkeying Around
- The video I spent 5 hours on
- Most recent video
and here's how to contact / support me:
- Email - james@mckinven.co
- Indie Feast Membership
Today I'm joined by Danny Miranda, who is the host of The Danny Miranda podcast, which has rapidly grown to over 50,000 downloads in less than 6 months. He publishes 3x a week and has had some awesome guests including Harry Dry, Gary Vee and David Perell. Danny is a walking case study of shooting your shot, making your own luck and having laser focus on one single thing.
But this episode isn't going to be about podcasting specifically, we're going to talk about how consistency, compounding and execution can lead to you making progress in your personal projects or entrepreneurial ventures. I think you'll be inspired by Danny's story.
What we covered:
- Who is Danny Miranda?
- Why Danny started out dropshipping? and what stopped him from pursuing that?
- How did the podcast come about?
- Why podcasting isn't that saturated
- Why Danny committed to 100 episodes when he started
- The unintended benefits of podcasts?
- Why laser focus and consistency is the key to Danny's growth
- How Danny switched from a starter to a finisher
- How to stop context switching
- Why accountability is the key to motivation
- Short term vs long term thinking
- Why the 75 hard program had so much of an impact on Danny
- Danny's plan to make money with the pod!
Recommendations
- Book: Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It
- Podcast: Modern Wisdom
- Indie Hacker: Steph Smith
Follow Danny
- Website
- Podcast
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to this episode's sponsor, Churnkey
It can be a huge challenge to keep churn down when your SaaS product starts to see traction. The founders of Churnkey know exactly how much of a challenge this can be, having collectively grown three SaaS companies to over $4m in ARR.
They realized that they were thinking about cancellations all wrong. A relationship with a customer doesn’t stop with the “Cancel” button. So they built Churnkey, which reduces churn by up to 42% with custom cancellation flows. For every customer who clicks “Cancel,” Churnkey offers up dynamic offers that encourage customers to stay subscribed.
Just connect Stripe and plug in a small bit of code. In minutes, you’ll be reducing churn by immediately unlocking subscription pauses, dynamic offers, and cancellation insights.
See how much revenue Churnkey can recover for you. Visit churnkey.co to start your free trial.
Derrick Reimer is the founder of SavvyCal, a new approach to calendar scheduling and has grown to multiple thousands MRR since he launched it earlier in 2020. Derrick also co-founded Drip with Rob Walling in 2012, which was acquired by Leadpages in 2016. You might have heard Derrick on the Art of Product podcast with Tuple co-founder Ben Orenstein where they document their journey building their products.
Get ad-free and extended conversations of the podcast with Indie Feast membership, for just £4 a month.
What we covered in this episode:
- What is SavvyCal?
- What problem is it trying to solve?
- Why go into such a crowded market?
- A nice market or crowded one?
- The advantage of being a solo founder or small team vs larger competition
- How long did Derrick build before launching the MVP?
- How much growth has come from pre-existing audience?
- What goes into a good Product Hunt launch?
- When should Indie Hackers bring marketing support on?
- What marketing tactics can you employ?
- How does TinySeed funding work?
- Should other founders look for this type of funding?
- Art of Product podcast
Recommendations
- Book: The Mom Test
- Podcast: Software Social
Follow Derrick
- Website
- SavvyCal
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to this episode's sponsor, Churnkey
It can be a huge challenge to keep churn down when your SaaS product starts to see traction. The founders of Churnkey know exactly how much of a challenge this can be, having collectively grown three SaaS companies to over $4m in ARR.
They realized that they were thinking about cancellations all wrong. A relationship with a customer doesn’t stop with the “Cancel” button. So they built Churnkey, which reduces churn by up to 42% with custom cancellation flows. For every customer who clicks “Cancel,” Churnkey offers up dynamic offers that encourage customers to stay subscribed.
Just connect Stripe and plug in a small bit of code. In minutes, you’ll be reducing churn by immediately unlocking subscription pauses, dynamic offers, and cancellation insights.
See how much revenue Churnkey can recover for you. Visit churnkey.co to start your free trial.
Natalie Nagele is the co-founder of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk, People-First Jobs and more. Wildbit has just turned 20 years old, so Natalie knows exactly what it takes to grow and scale successful bootstrapped businesses. What makes Natalie so interesting to me is that she’s in the group of seriously successful indie hackers (over 100k customers, around for 20 years, pretty large team etc.) and they’re still indie very much living by their own rules.
What we covered in this episode:
- What would you tell yourself 20 years ago before starting Wildbit?
- How do you find work that you enjoy and fulfils you?
- How much time should you spend on hobbies vs your business?
- At what point is a hobby a business and vice versa?
- How to get into deep work
- Cal Newport, Deep Work
- How many hours you can actually work in a day
- How much should you work on your business?
- Why you need to take time to step back and think
- How much is Natalie working now?
- How do you fit work in with the stuff you enjoy?
- Work life balance
Recommendations
- Book: Anti-fragile
- Podcast: 99% Invisible
- Indie Hacker: Chris Savage + Brendan Schwartz
Follow Natalie
- Wildbit
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to this episode's sponsor, Churnkey
It can be a huge challenge to keep churn down when your SaaS product starts to see traction. The founders of Churnkey know exactly how much of a challenge this can be, having collectively grown three SaaS companies to over $4m in ARR.
They realized that they were thinking about cancellations all wrong. A relationship with a customer doesn’t stop with the “Cancel” button. So they built Churnkey, which reduces churn by up to 42% with custom cancellation flows. For every customer who clicks “Cancel,” Churnkey offers up dynamic offers that encourage customers to stay subscribed.
Just connect Stripe and plug in a small bit of code. In minutes, you’ll be reducing churn by immediately unlocking subscription pauses, dynamic offers, and cancellation insights.
See how much revenue Churnkey can recover for you. Visit churnkey.co to start your free trial.
Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host and is in a similar position to most indie hackers - working on his side-project alongside a full time job, but has had a career packed with learnings that we're going to talk through in this episode. Elston started out his career at JP Morgan, having reluctantly accepted a graduate job he planned to stay at for 6 months. 4 years later, he was still at the conglomerate bank, but he wasn't satisfied staying there for the rest of his career.
While at JP Morgan, Elston launched a few side-projects, some of which still make revenue today, but decided to leave to chase the startup dream. Fast forward a year and the startup dream was over, a company with 14 employees but little traction - sound familiar?
Elston went back to work full-time while he figured things out. In January 2020, he launched Tiiny.host, a super simple way to host your projects. After launching, he made $1,000 in just 3 days using lifetime deals and is now chugging away nicely as a side project.
What we covered in this episode:
- What is Tiiny Host and why did Elston start it
- How he made lifetime deals work for his launch
- Why Elston has put marketing first for Tiiny Host
- Setting goals for your indie hacker business
- How Tiiny Host got 150 sites a day being created from free SEO pages
- How has he made marketing fun
- Doing side-project marketing
- Elston's plans to go full-time
Recommendations
- Book: Traction
- Podcast: Tim Ferris Show
- Indie Hacker: Sabba Kenyejad
Follow Elston
- Tiiny Host
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Marie Poulin is the host of Notion Office Hours, creator of Notion Mastery, Run Your Learning Launch, Digital Strategy School, Think Like a Digital Strategist, and co-founded Oki Doki with her husband, where they help folks create, launch, and market online courses and training programs.
What we covered in this episode:
- What is Notion Mastery and why did Marie start it?
- The impact YouTube had on growth
- How the course earned $10k in the first week
- Why Marie doubled down on the course as her main project
- Why it's important not to be a perfectionist
- Why niching is important
- How 80% of Marie's course revenue came from YouTube
- How to make the most out of Notion
- How to enjoy the work you do
- Making $10k extra a month with Gumroad templates
Recommendations
- Book: Do More Great Work
- Podcast: This Is Uncomfortable
- Indie Hacker: Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Follow Marie
- Notion Mastery
- Marie's YouTube
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thank you to this episode's sponsor, ilo.so!
You probably know that Twitter is an incredibly useful tool for us as indie hackers, but sometimes Twitter's in-built analytics tool doesn't quite give you the metrics that really matter. Dan Rowden, from Indie Bites episode 17, has created the most useful analytics tool for Twitter, giving you the metrics that actually help you understand your tweet performance and grow your audience.
With one glance, ilo helps you easily see which kind of tweets get more impressions, likes, profile clicks and more so you can get grow your Twitter audience.
Head toilo.so and use the code INDIEBITES20 to get 25% off your ilo subscription for life. There are only 10 codes available so check it out before they all go!
Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company. In over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business.
Get the full, 60 minute conversation with Arvid here with the Indie Feast membership.
What we covered in this episode:
- The Feedback Panda story
- Was the ambition to sell the company from the start?
- Built to Sell, John Warrillow
- What Indie Hackers can learn from Zero to Sold
- What happens once you sell a business?
- Why settle on the format of a book?
- Why didn't Arvid make his book free?
- How to find a critical problem in a market that's willing to pay
- Tips for going into a crowded market
- How to to find your audience
Recommendations
- Book: The Mom Test
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Sergio Mattei
Follow Arvid
- The Embedded Entrepreneur
- Zero to Sold
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Today we have Embarque.io supporting the show! Embarque is run by a fellow indie hacker and has just crossed 6 figures in revenue. Embarque is an agency that offers productised SEO content that converts.
It blew my mind when Julian told me about the growth their client MentorCruise had from the SEO content, resulting in 107% increase in MRR, 100% increase in monthly trials and a 114% increase SEO traffic. My word, wouldn't you want those kind of results for your indie business.
Go and check out what Embarque are offering at Embarque.io and get $100 off your first package with the code 'INDIEBITES'.
Today we're joined by Philip Kiely, who is currently Head of Marketing at Gumroad. Philip also launched "Writing for Software Developers" last May, making $20,000 in sales in its first week without any pre-existing audience. Since then, Philip has been on a mission to help as many software developers as possible realize that they possess the skills they need to become great writers.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Philip wrote 'Writing for Software Developers'
- How Philip made $20k in 24 hours with no pre-existing audience
- Should you do pre-sales if you're selling an info product?
- How Philip got his job at Gumroad
- Why there has been a boom in the creator economy
- Why choose Gumroad as your selling platform
- Where a new creator should start when selling a product
- Who made the most money on Gumroad in 2020
- Gumroad Stats 2020
Follow Philip
- Website
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Interested in ad-free episodes an exclusive content? Sign up to the Indie Feast membership.
Dan, like many other indie hackers, runs a bunch of projects alongside a full-time job which all compound to him making over $5k a month. In 2012 he started Magpile, a free online resource about magazines, which was followed by Subsail, a platform to help indie publishers sell magazine subscriptions.
Earlier this year Dan started using the publishing platform Ghost, which he then started to build a suite of products around, now including:
- Gloat; a productised service for hosting and self hosting
- Cove; a commenting tool for Ghost blogs
- Substation; a theme for Ghost
Dan also launched ilo, a better analytics platform for Twitter a few months ago, which has earned over $6k in revenue since launch.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Dan lives in Mauritius
- Why choose multiple projects over doing just one?
- How do you manage your time with 3 kids, a wife and a full-time job?
- Why Dan isn't too worried about 'growing' his side projects
- The pros and cons of working on your side project with a full-time job
- Not worrying about the money your side project earns - does it take the fun out of it?
- Why is Dan so bullish on Ghost?
- Why having a 'suite' of products is complimentary to each other
- Getting a 75k acquisition offer
- Awesome thread on the $75k offer
- What were the options?
- Being prepared to sell your projects
- Building an alternative to Twitter analytics
Recommendations
- Magazine: Courier
- Newsletter: Dense Discovery
- Podcast: Startup
- Indie Hacker: Justin Jackson
Follow Dan
- Website
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Interested in ad-free episodes an exclusive content? Sign up to the Indie Feast membership.
Dianna Allen is the founder of TERRA, a DTC candle brand, where she designs and hand pours a variety of candles. In October 2020, Dianna left her life as a freelancer behind to put her efforts into TERRA full-time, which as we all know, is a huge leap to make.
What we covered:
- Should more indie hackers work on physical products?
- What happened with Budget Meal Planner?
- Should more indie hackers kill projects more often?
- Does turning a passion into a business take the enjoyment away?
- What was the breakthrough moment with Terra
- Making the leap going full-time with your business
- Why Dianna went straight into
- How do the economics of a physical product business work?
- How Terra was started with just $100
- Using Instagram for 99% of growth
- The hardest part of running a physical product business
- How to balance one-term purchases vs MRR
- Why we should support more small businesses?
Links
- Dianna's IH podcast episode
- Dianna's article on growing TERRA to 50k
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog
- Indie Hacker: AJ from Carrd
- Podcast: Doesn't listen
Follow Dianna
- Terra
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. They interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started their business and how they grew it, including revenue figures for every business they interview.
But in this episode, we’re going to be discussing the new SEO course that Pat launched this week, making over $20k in pre-sales.
What we covered
- 20k in 2 weeks, how did you do it?
- How and why Pat started Starter Story?
- How he grew it to 500,000 monthly visitors
- Why Reddit can be a goldmine, but why Pat stopped using it
- How Starter Story allowed Pat to go full-time
- The most insane story out of 2,000 posts
- Brumate
- D*ck at Your Door
- Using Twitter to validate an idea
- Executing on that idea
- How to price a course
- The benefit of building in public
- How to execute so quickly
- How to build an audience
Recommendations
- Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Harry Dry
Follow Pat
- Starter Story
- Pat's Building Thread
- Lean SEO Course
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Today I’m joined by Rob Hope, who is a South African designer, developer and the host of one of my favorite podcasts out there for entrepreneurs Yo!. He's also the founder of One Page Love, Email Love, and has recently released an ebook with a hundred landing page tips. It's safe to say Rob knows his stuff. When it comes to building landing pages, having started One Page Love back in 2008.
What we discussed in this episode:
- Have we lost the joy of simplicity?
- How to cut through the noise
- What makes a good landing page
- Rob's mammoth landing page Twitter thread
- How to write a good Twitter thread
- Have lots of projects at the same time
- Do you have to make money off a side project
- How do you achieve freedom
Recommendations
- Landing Page: Muzzle
- Book: Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: AJ (from Carrd)
Follow Rob
- Landing Page Thread
- One Page Love
- Website
- Yo!
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Mark Asquith (aka That British Podcast Guy) is the CEO of Rebel Base Media, the U.K. podcast tech company that makes Captivate.fm and so much more.
What we discussed in this episode:
- What makes podcasting such a good medium
- Is the amount of investment in podcasting (from the likes of Spotify) a good thing?
- Is podcasting oversaturated?
- What does it take to grow a podcast?
- How to stay consistent with producing your show
- How Mark started out with his businesses
- Bootstrapping the next venture
Recommendations
- Book: E-Myth Revisited
- Podcast: The Jordan Harbinger Show
- Indie Hacker: Corey Haines
Follow Mark
- Rebel Base Media
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for a 30 day free trial.
Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers. Ramy started Page Flows after building a UI newsletter to thousands of subscribers, trying to improve his own skills as a developer who cares about design. Ramy is now a full-time indie hacker, with Page Flows making enough revenue to sustain him, alongside a few other side projects.
What we discussed in this episode:
- Is the full-time indie hacker dream all it's made out to be
- Why Ramy tried six startups in six months, was it a success?
- Do founders work on things for too long?
- Ramy's journey working for a VC backed startup
- How it compares to bootstrapping
- What is Page Flows?
- How does it earn money?
- The trend of content / directory businesses
- Has he wasted his spare time?
- Why Ramy stopped sharing revenue numbers
Recommendations
- Book: Hatching Twitter
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels
Follow Ramy
- Page Flows
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Nick Fogle is the co-founder of Wavve and ChurnKey, but there is a lot more to Nick than just that. Wavve is an audio to video platform which has now hit $1.5m in ARR, but Nick has only left his full time job 3 years after starting the company and 9 months after it had eclipsed his salary. Why? Well, Nick had $250,000 student loans to pay off.
What we covered in this episode:
- How Nick got into $250,000 of debt
- How he felt in Christmas 2016 when he was looking at the massive number
- What steps he took to get out of debt (he wrote a book about this)
- What advice he'd give to others in the same position
- Why he started Wavve, a video to audio platform
- How the business grew to $1.5m ARR
- What it takes to work full time and run a business
- Why staying lean is so important for him
Recommendations
- Book: Anti Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Podcast: Reply All
- Indie Hacker: Scott Hurff
Wilhelm Klopp is the founder of Simple Poll, a super simple (but powerful) poll Slack app that has over 600k active users. Wil now works on Simple Poll full time having left his job at GitHub in September 2019 (1 year ago 🎉).
What we discussed in this episode:
- Hows the year been after leaving GitHub
- What is Simple Poll
- How Wil came up with the idea
- How he grew the app to 600k users
- What he did to start charging for a free app
- The danger of building for another platform (Slack)
- How he transitioned to work full-time on Simple Poll
- What it's like being a full-time indie hacker
- Why it's quite good having a job while working on side projects
Quick fire answers
- Podcast: Art of Product
- Book: The Great CEO Within
- Indie Hacker: Natalie Nagele
Follow Wil
- Simple Poll
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Mugshot Bot for sponsoring Indie Bites.
Mugshot Bot automatically generates unique, beautifully designed images for every page on your website or blog so you don’t have to worry about them. This means you can focus on what matters: building your product and creating great content.
Mugshot Bot is a tool that I use personally and made by another indie hacker, Joe Masilotti.
To level up your link previews, go to mugshotbot.com/indiebites, link in the show notes, to create an image for your site, completely free.
Mubashar 'Mubs' Iqbal is a prolific maker who has started over 90 projects. Currently Mubs is building Founderpath with Nathan Latka, and on One Hour SaaS where he spends one hour every day working on SaaS businesses.
In this episode we talked about:
- How Mubs got into starting side-projects
- How he comes up with ideas and decides what to work on
- Why some of his projects run on auto-pilot
- How much it costs to run those that are on auto-pilot
- How to sell side-projects
- How to build side-projects quickly
- What Mubs most successful project has been
- How did Founderpath come about
- Why Mubs started One Hour SaaS
Recommendations
- Book: Built to Sell
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Ben Tossell
Follow Mubs
- One Hour SaaS
- Mubs' projects portfolio
- Founderpath
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Mugshot Bot for sponsoring Indie Bites.
Mugshot Bot automatically generates unique, beautifully designed images for every page on your website or blog so you don’t have to worry about them. This means you can focus on what matters: building your product and creating great content.
Mugshot Bot is a tool that I use personally and made by another indie hacker, Joe Masilotti.
To level up your link previews, go to mugshotbot.com/indiebites, link in the show notes, to create an image for your site, completely free.
Rosie Sherry is a community builder, indie hacker and founder. She currently runs the Indie Hackers community and also a weekly newsletter where she talks about building communities. Previously, Rosie founded Ministry of Testing.
In this episode we talked about:
- Rosie's background as an indie hacker
- Going full time on Ministry of Testing, growing that into a £1m+ business
- What it's like running the Indie Hackers community
- What makes a good Indie Hackers post
- How to make the most out of the platform
- Why Rosie started Rosieland, her paid newsletter
- What goes into building a community
- How we can be a more inclusive community
Recommendations
- Book: Anything from Derek Sivers
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Monica Lent
Follow Rosie
- Rosieland
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Corey Haines is the founder of Swipe Files, he also runs refactoring growth, mental models for marketing, hey marketers and he was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics. I've been a follower of Corey for a while and impressed by the level and consistency of everything he produces.
In this episode we talked about:
- What projects Corey is currently working on
- Why he left Baremetrics
- What it's like leaving a stable, full-time job to be an indie hacker
- How he manages his time between projects
- How much revenue he makes
- How to build things quickly
- Deciding on what ideas to focus on
- Advice for indie hackers wanting to live the dream
Recommendations
- Book: Atomic Habits
- Podcast: Akimbo
- Indie Hacker: David Perrell
Follow Corey
- Swipe Files
- Mental Models for Marketing
- Refactoring Growth
- Hey Marketers
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Full Transcript
James: You've got a lot going on. Tell me a little bit more about your various side projects, where your main focus is right now.
Corey: Yeah. So I don't know, maybe I just caught the entrepreneurial bug or have an itch to create stuff. But, about two years ago I started just making stuff on the side. I started with a newsletter actually that ended up shutting down later, but it was called the TLDR on SaaS marketing. And that was like my first entry point into creating something and sharing it online and it's actually the reason why I created my Twitter account in the first place. and then, yeah, it's just been through a little bit of. serendipity and connection between projects.
um, you know,
I was talking with a Baremetrics customer, actually. And he's like, Hey, where do I find someone like you?
where would you post a job if you were hiring yourself? And I was like, actually, I don't know. There isn't really like a job board for marketers. So I went out and built it. Later on I was talking about different mental models and frameworks that I've found really helpful for my work at Baremetrics.
Other people were asking for the Notion doc and you know where to learn more about it. So I figured out why don't I just package this up into a course, same thing with B2B SaaS marketing, with what we've done at Baremetrics is figuring out how to create this new course too. Now Swipe Files, I would swipe something and I would write some notes, some bullet points about here's, what I think is great about it and then I noticed this is actually pretty useful because there's a few sites out there, like swipefile.com and Swipe Worthy, or I think it's swiped.co, which are fantastic sources of inspiration, but you still have to do the work to figure out what you want to glean from it.
So Swipe Files is my attempt to build a library of content where I will tell you and show you what it is you can take away from it instead of having to deduce it for yourself. And now I've got a bunch of other things I'll do in the future, but, yesterday went full time as a creator on my own stuff.
James: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that. So previously you head of growth at Baremetrics. How long were you there for and, what went into making decision that now is the right time to leave?
Corey: I was there for almost two years and had a fantastic time, experimented with a ton. We grew about 30% which was great for a bootstrapped company. I really changed a lot and I was all over the place with, trying to find different channels and breakthroughs, and really what we came to was that company wasn't at the right spot to really support a growth role with the budget and the engineering time that was needed to really push the ball forward and so just decided to part ways. And I was already the place that I wanted to go full time and my own stuff anyways I think coincidentally, a little bit serendipitously was perfectly the timing for me to start working on my own stuff full time and, head on to this new chapter of my life.
James: So with your various side projects, or they're not side projects now that you're full time projects, How do they each look in terms of revenue what's making the most for you?
Corey: Yeah right now the breadwinner are the courses, refactoring growth and mental models for marketing and I've done about 36,000 in the last 10 months.
I couldn't do what I'm doing today without that revenue on the side, to be able to, fund myself into going full time as a creator. The other one, now that I'm trying to build into becoming the breadwinner is Swipe Files. And to date I actually, I couldn't tell you the revenue that has done, I think it's probably done a couple thousand in revenue because it's split between monthly annual in lifetimes.
It's a little bit more difficult for me to... I didn't go through Stripe and do the math beforehand. but, um, it does about like the MRR today is about a thousand dollars. and then, Hey Marketers, to be honest, I've started to neglected for the last year. I launched it and then I spent a good four or five months working really hard on it. And then figured I would outsource it to my nephew, who is a poor college student and, and needs some cheap, manual labor.
It still does $100 to $300 a month, maybe. And it's a pay what you want model too. So sometimes I'll get a job posting for one dollar and sometimes I'll get a job posting for a hundred bucks. But it depends.
James: so you've got all of these projects so much going on now. How do you squeeze it all in? And how did you manage your time before? I guess this week?
Corey: The answer is I didn't, and I'm going to figure it out now. When I was with Baremetrics full time, I was very much working in these sprints. With Hey Marketers; I created the job for within three weekends and then I would just work here and there nights and weekends, especially, it wasn't very much work, to be honest. With the courses I created Mental Models for Marketing within the span of a month, about a week of that was spent on vacation with a Thanksgiving break. Same thing with Refactoring Growth; it took me about 45 days to create that course. About two weeks of that was spent on vacation, just heads down, creating a lot of the content.
With Swipe Files now that's really been kinda my nights and weekends project, where Monday nights is like my night or I'll sit down and I'll write the tear down schedule the email, schedule the tweet thread. Now, what I'm wanting to do is, really go all in on Swipe Files, and trying to get into a cadence.
I heard some advice from, from my friend, Michael Taylor, but I'd also been thinking this beforehand, but getting into a cadence where Mondays are going to be my podcasting day. Tuesday are going to be my tear down's day. Wednesday is going to be my meetings day, maybe with friends and or consulting or whatever. Thursday is going to be my, articles and guides day.
And then Friday, it's going to be my newsletter, something like that, Where I kind of time blocks specific parts of that I can really get into deep work and focus.
James: How do you decide which ideas to pursue, and then how do you stay focused on it and not get distracted by new ideas or, or pursuing something until it gets to a point where it's growing nicely?
Corey: Yeah, I probably skew towards spending too much time on something. So that's something I'm trying to work against. Like for example, when I was doing the newsletter, my very first project, I did it a full year and only got 200 subscribers and just didn't feel like it was going anywhere, I think that what's helped with the courses and it Swipe Files is that they're very much, you get the content work done once and then you can just market it afterwards.
And so that's really helped me and my own weaknesses and my own personality. Just being able to jump between projects. I was like, alright, great, I've created one course now let's create another course. Now let's create a membership site. Like they all just, allowed me to be all over the place.
But what's helped me cause I have a bazillion other ideas that I could pursue. And all of these came from that same kind of idea bucket. And what I found helps is just writing every single thing down. I used to use Evernote, then I used Notion now use Roam and I've ported everything over there and had been using that for several months now.
But literally every single thought that enters my brain gets put somewhere, especially business ideas and I'll flush it out. All right. Type up all the things that I have that way I can just get it out of my mind, not thinking about it again. And usually what I like to do is if I think about it again over and over again, and it keeps coming up and I keep revisiting and I keep writing more ideas, then I know that there's something here .
James: Yeah, I think what you're able to do as well is build things quite quickly.
Corey: Yeah, I think speed is vastly underrated and underappreciated for aspiring entrepreneurs, indie hackers, anyone who's building something.
The point is to create something quickly and fast and to get it out and get it in front of people.
Each of the courses I did under 45 days, Swipe Files took me about 60 days, about two months to get from first breaking ground in Webflow to launching and feeling done with it.
And that's really allowed me to 1/ be able to do it and finish it cause the longer something goes on, the less likely you are to finish it. but 2/ be able to grow and see significant progress.
James: yeah. What, what what's been your biggest struggle with building your various projects?
Corey: Time, I think just lack of time. Not wanting any of the time to bleed into time at Baremetrics, I'm working full time at a job where I have an obligation. And so that was, so many nights and weekends where I was just like half falling asleep, writing, creating something, trying to plan something.
And so that's been the biggest struggle for me has just been; feeling a little bit like, kinda caged up, like I'm wanting to get out. I working in a straight jacket. Like I can't do all the things that I want to do because I don't have the physical time.
James: And I'd ask you what your advice is. For indie hackers who are sort of in the position you're in before working a full time job, got various different projects on the go and they want the dream of leaving their job and working full time on their projects.
What advice would you give to them?
Corey: I would say just make a lot of stuff and get it out of your system, and test things out because there's no safer time to do that when you have a paycheck. I think the mistake that. This isn't a knock on them, but I was just listening to the Dru Riley podcast with Courtland and on the indie hackers podcast.
And, he was talking about how he had an amazing job saved up 250 grand and then quit. And then basically has just been burning through savings for the last three years because he was comfortable. and I was like
"that's amazing, that's great, I'm glad he found something that worked for him "
but you don't have to do it that way. If he hadn't been experimenting while he was still at his job. And then he found something, that worked or that was viable, or that was promising and then left his job, he would have had the savings to work on that thing full time, instead of doing the opposite of, let me burn through my savings to find something that works and then race against the clock to replace that income.
So I would say experiment, get yourself in a good financial position. The more savings, the better, but also the more traction initially, the better as well. You need the cushion traction. So try to find as much of both of those as you can while you're still working full time.
James: Corey, I wanted to talk just quickly, very quickly about Twitter because you're super active on Twitter. What's your strategy or goal with Twitter?
Corey: I didn't have a Twitter strategy I think up until I started with Swipe Files, to be honest. Because, one, it was just me sharing, interesting, relevant things, working at Baremetrics, sharing about marketing, commenting with people . I shared basically nothing about my personal life on Twitter. It's all business, marketing, SaaS, entrepreneurship. So that gives people a reason to follow me. yeah, I think the main three things are. Being an interesting person with interesting things to say, making a lot of friends who can amplify you and then having a consistent schedule of, I mean, I think threads are a fantastic way of delivering content.
they're more interesting. People are more likely to retweet it just cause it's more valuable than a single tweet. and I keep it very focused on again, SaaS, marketing, entrepreneurship, and business in general.
James: Yeah, without a doubt, that's a really cool way to do it. we'll sort of round off with a final question about. the tools you use, because we haven't really discussed that at all,
what are the marketing tools and growth tools would you recommend for indie hackers?
Corey: Yeah. So I build most of my sites in Webflow. I have one site, on Carrd, I'm a huge fan of Webflow and I love the flexibility. I still don't really don't know how to use Carrd that much, to be honest. So I might eventually move off of it. It's just crazy cheap and it's amazing deal and AJ is a great creator so I like supporting him. I use right message for all my kind of email capture and that connects with Convert Kit, which is what I use for all email marketing newsletter related things. I use Member Stack on top of Webflow to create the membership site for Swipe Files.
I've also been using Sparkloop for my newsletter, a referral program, which needs some tweaking and some massaging, but has also worked really, I've gotten a couple of big wins from it, which has already justified the cost for where, the vast majority of people do not refer anyone, but a couple people do and they bring in 50 subscribers each and I'm like, all right.
Wow. This is, you know, glad we had that in place
James: All right then final, quick fire questions. What's your favorite book, Corey?
Corey: Oh man. I'm looking at my book sack back here. You know, I don't know if I have a favorite book. how about this? I'll give you my favorite books from the last three years. So I've like a favorite book of the year. 2018 for me was Atomic Habits. 2019 for me was Ultra Learning. 2020 for me has been a book called the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by a guy named John Mark Homer and, it's just about essentially the way you're supposed to live life as a Christian, you know, religious, but I think there's a lot of really practical implications for kind of this culture of Busy-ness in America that we've gotten ourselves into and try to reverse that a bit.
James: and you say you're a podcast binger, what's your favorite?
Corey: Akimbo - Seth Godin.
James: Which indie hacker do you admire slash who should people Follow?
Corey: Oh man. You know what? David Perrel is... dude, the guy's just, I don't think people even understand what he's done, with his Twitter following where he's come from his podcasts, his course. the guy is just a machine he's super smart, but also his success already is amazing, you just look at the success of them and you can, you can't ignore, the guy does a million plus course sales a year.
He has the podcast, he does the angel investing. Many other things we probably don't even know about yet that he has his hands in, and it's just, sky's the limit for that guy.
James: Very impressive. And then finally, what are you most excited for the future? Both personally and business or both?
Corey: I'm really stoked to start working on a SaaS business, to be honest. It's a long journey. It's a long road, but that's my end goal.
James: Absolutely Corey, you've been an immense guest we've recorded for 50 minutes and it's going to go all into a 15 minute podcast.
Corey: Cool. Amazing, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indy bites. I hope you feel inspired by listening to this conversation between me and Corey.
if you did enjoy this episode, I'd love you to share the episode with just one in the hacker that will find it useful. It does help the podcast grow.
As always you'll find links for everything discussed in the episode, in the show notes. That's all from me enjoy the rest of your day
Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder and CEO of VEED - an online video editing platform. VEED is a fully-fledged collaborative video editing product used by many influencers, coaches and businesses for adding subtitles, captions, text, merging videos, making meme videos, turning podcasts to videos and much more.
What we covered in this episode:
On Veed
- What is Veed?
- Where did you come up with the idea?
- What is your current revenue?
- Had you started and failed with anything before?
- What made Veed work out?
- Many indie hackers are solo. You have a co-founder split 50/50 on the business, do you think it's worth indie hackers going out to find a co-founder?
- There are many online video editing tools out there. Wavve, Headliner, Kapwing. What makes Veed different and how has that fed into your growth?
On growth and marketing
- Veed has grown super quickly, but how did you get your first 100 users?
- Then how did you convert them to paying customers?
- Your marketing strategy. What did you do at the start for your growth?
- When you started generating revenue, you hired content creators. Why?
- What are your tips for marketing without budget?
- Biggest mistakes / advice you'd give to founders
Recommendations
- Favourite indie hacker is Josh Pigford.
- Best book for indie hackers; Traction.
- Favourite podcast; How I Built This.
Follow Sabba
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Full transcript coming soon.
Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers in 2016, grew the business $8k MRR with sponsors, and then sold to Stripe 9 months later. An inspirational story that doesn't end there. Courtland has now been working from within Stripe for the past 4 years, where he continues to build on the platform and produce the excellent Indie Hackers podcast. He's a fountain of knowledge and I think you'll love this episode.
What we covered in this episode:
On Indie Hackers:
- Why did Courtland start IH?
- What is an 'indie hacker'?
- What are the pros and cons of building within Stripe?
- Does he have goals for IH set by Stripe?
- Does he have any other side projects, aside from IH?
On indie hacking:
- Where should new indie hackers start?
- How do you stay motivated as a one-person team?
- The growth of communities
- The growth of paid newsletters
- The current state of bootstrapping
Quick fire
- Favourite indie hackers are; Lynne Tye, Rosie Sherry, Amy Hoy, Natalie Nagele.
- Best book for indie hackers; Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sapiens, Hooked.
- Favourite podcast; Conversations with Tyler.
Follow Courtland
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Full Transcript
James: Courtland has inspired so many of us to build our profitable internet businesses. Let's talk to him to find out what's important as an indie hacker in 2020. Courtland, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Courtland: Excellent James. Thanks for having me.
James: To set the scene and for those that might not know, tell me a little bit more about what Indie Hackers is and why you started the website?
Courtland: Yeah. So I moved to the Bay Area when I was like 23. I wanted to start a very stereotypical high growth tech startup. I wanted to be a unicorn company. I wanted to make billions and be world famous. After seven or so years of that struggle, I was just tired of it. I got tired of the VC funded software world.
And so I took time off work. I was doing a lot of contract development and I just started searching for other examples of people who've done the same thing. And it turns out there wasn't really a good way to learn how to do this. Everybody online was doing the same thing I was doing; just like looking for comments left by Pieter Levels or like tweets where some people would share some tidbit of their story, but like we couldn't find anything great. And so I kind of just solved my own problem and said, you know, I should build the thing that helps people do this. I was surprised it didn't exist. And here we are 4 years later, somewhat ironically, I decided that I wanted to be a bootstrapper. I decided that I wanted to get out of the high growth startup game.
And within a year, starting Indie Hackers, it was acquired by Stripe and fulfilled one of the goals of a lot of people in the high growth startup game want to. So that's how we got to where we are today.
James: What is your definition of an indie hacker?
Courtland: I think Tyler Tringas actually put it well recently. He said that "the new American dream is to build a profitable, sustainable, remote software business that you can run from home ". You can run from wherever you want work with wherever you want, that scales nicely, and that prints money for you. And I think an indie hacker is somebody who's trying to achieve that. Someone who doesn't like the status quo, someone who doesn't want to work for the man for the rest of their life.
There's no problem with doing that. I think jobs provide a lot of stability for people, a lot of predictability, but if you're like me, you just don't want to have a boss. You don't want there to be a cap on your salary. You don't want somebody else telling you what to work on. You want to control your own life and you're an indie hacker.
James: What are the challenges and benefits of building Indie Hackers from within Stripe?
Courtland: I don't have to get on the phone with advertisers anymore. Indie Hackers makes $0. It's a hundred percent just me focusing on making the community good and helping it grow. I think probably the one challenge is that I'm someone who puts a lot of pressure on my shoulders to, I think, perform well for others. And at Stripe, Patrick Collison is my boss. He went out on a limb and acquired Indie Hackers, and I feel a lot of pressure to make sure that any hackers, is a success.
And at Stripe, like I'm extremely autonomous. I talk to Patrick and the team there once every three months, once every six months, sometimes, and it's almost always just check-ins; how are you doing? Do you need anything? What can we help with et cetera? It's like the ideal working situation. I can't imagine having a job under any other kind of framework.
James: Are you tied to any goals within Stripe? Do they set any targets for you that you have to reach, such as traffic numbers or engagement?
Courtland: There isn't any sort of like you have to reach X number or the axe will fall. I think what's cool about the fact that I joined Stripe is that my goals are very much aligned with theirs. And I think if you ever work with any sort of partner or you acquire anyone or you get acquired, you should always try to make sure your goals are aligned because if there's even a one degree difference between where you want to go and where they go, at first that's very small, but after a number of years, that gap has widened into something that's like very hard to fix.
And so I just want Indie Hackers to be like as big and as meaningful and useful as possible. I think about that religiously every single day. And that's what Stripe wants to ultimately they want more people starting companies. They want those companies to succeed and make a whole bunch of money because then Stripe makes money. So there's really like perfect alignment. There's no need for Stripe to tell me what to do, or force me to do things that I don't want and vice versa. I'm not really pushing against the Stripe mothership in any way.
James: Do you have any sort of side projects you want to work on or the urge to do indie hacking outside of working on Indie Hackers and for Stripe?
Courtland: Every day I wake up, it's like, well, what am I going to work on today? Am I going to build out a network of podcasts? Am I going to create like a milestones leaderboard that's similar to Product Hunt, but for indie hackers. Am I going to create like a groups interface so indie hackers can create their own communities? And so I already feel like I have a ton of side projects.
James: Let's move on a little bit to indie hacking in general and what advice you can give to current indie hackers. How about those that are at the start of their journey with indie hacking. where should they start?
Courtland: Those are the best indie hackers. In fact, that's most indie hackers. Most people don't know what to work on and they're not sure what to start. And I think the first thing you should do is probably ask yourself what it is you want in the first place.
Like, why do you want to be an indie hacker? Who inspired you? What do you want to accomplish?
Usually, the answer is some form of freedom, but there's lots of different forms of freedom. Do you want the creative freedom to work on whatever you want? Do you want to work from wherever you want? Like how much money do you need to make?
These are all really important questions because I think if you set out to do something without knowing what your goals are and knowing what would help you feel accomplished, then when you eventually hit that goal, it doesn't feel that great because you don't even realize that you hit it and you don't know if you should keep going, you should change directions, et cetera.
So, I always advise people to start off by just like spending an hour or two, just asking yourself what you want, who you are, what kinds of things make you happy in life?
I just think it's really important to know who you are and what's gonna make you happy. Second. I think you've gotta avoid the common pitfalls of idea generation. For example, we all think that starting a company is like having an invention, right?
A real business idea, I think should start. Always from the problem, not from the solution.
People are driven to take actions in the world because they're trying to fulfil their desires because they're trying to solve problems. And if you want people to take action in the direction of the thing that you built, you need to understand their desires and their problems and make sure that the thing that you build solves that.
But if you're trying to come up with an idea, I would say, just get obsessed with the problem and don't fall into the trap of thinking that it needs to be some problem that no one's ever solved before.
James: Yeah, I think it was absolutely sound advice. A lot of indie hackers are solo founders and sometimes it can be isolating when you're a one person team working away in your business. What's your advice about getting stuff done and staying motivated as a one person team?
Courtland: Even though, like I started Indie Hackers as a one person team. Right before I joined Stripe, I brought in my brother to work with me and we talked to each other on the phone every day. I'm a huge fan of social accountability.
We're social creatures. We care a lot about what other people think about us. We don't want to let down our coworkers. We don't want to let down our colleagues. So I think as a founder when you've gone from probably working a job your whole life to suddenly being on your own, and you don't have a boss, you don't have coworkers, you don't have anybody who expects anything and no one even knows what's on your to do list, it can be a bit jarring. And you might think, oh, what I need to do is figure out all these different productivity hacks to really push myself to work harder, but I think, the ultimate productivity hack is just have someone that you're accountable to.
Have a mentor, a partner, a co-founder. It could be your customers. Early on with Indie Hackers I just resolved that every week I was going to send an email to my mailing list and it was going to have a section right at the top where I said; this is what I did this week and here's what I'm going to get done next week.
I can't skip out on it. I can't let this other person down.
James: Yeah, that's something that I've personally found really useful. We're seeing a lot more communities pop up, especially paid communities. And there was a post on Indie Hackers about trends that are coming up, and got a great answer or some thoughts about communities and why they're becoming more and more popular now. Why is it you think that?
Courtland: I think communities are the future. Being social is one of the main things that we do as human beings, we care about being parts of communities. We care about relating to others.
If you look at the 2010s, we always had these huge social networks. We had Twitter, we have Facebook and those are great in their own way, but there's a lot of problems with them that I'm sure everybody can enumerate. And so we're starting to see communities unbundle these huge social networks. We're starting to see people create more niche, interest based or personality based communities around certain topics.
Besides that, I think there's just a flywheel effect that's accelerating things. You have more and more people joining these communities who are realizing that they want some sort of social connection with people online, especially with COVID-19 and everybody stuck at home.
I think that gives people creating communities more incentive to create them. Because now, "Hey, my community is going to grow". There's so many people who want online community, like maybe I should start this. Maybe it's a good business model for me. Maybe it's like a fun way for me to connect or learn from other people.
And then once people start creating more communities and you have other companies that create tools that make it easier to create communities. Cause it's kinda like selling shovels to people during a gold rush, right? Whenever people were doing something you want to make tools for those people and help them do it better.
So there's been an absolute explosion in the past year of people creating community building websites, community building tools, community building blog posts, community building podcasts. And all of that in turn makes it way easier to build a community. So now the whole flywheel repeats, more people build communities, more people join communities, more people build tools for communities, et cetera.
James: We've also seen a growth in newsletters and paid newsletters. Why have we seen that?
Courtland: I think when it comes to newsletters and writing and especially podcasting, I put them all in one bucket. A lot of them are cults of personality. A lot of them are people realizing that they don't necessarily want to read the mainstream news.
And I think this has been true on the internet for quite some time, but I think that the growth of social media has really allowed people who have been writing on their own blogs and writing on their own newsletters to distribute what they've been doing to a wider audience. And then the growth of tools like Stripe and Patreon and just the acceptance of people making online payments has led these creators to realize; "okay, I can charge money for this".
I think we're at an inflection point where people are tremendously inspired by seeing some of the numbers that a few individuals have been putting up. You start to think;
" Hey, maybe I should have a blog where I write about tech topics three or four days a week and see what I can do."
It's just this formula of inspiration, which I think about a lot at indie hackers, which is, you show a story of someone doing something just amazing and making a ton of money, something that people can relate to you, they can imagine how it would change their lives. Then you break down how they're doing it and you make it approachable, and you talk about the person's background and you show how they're approachable too.
In other words, you relay the message. Hey, you could do this too. And that's like the trifecta formula for inspiring people to do things.
James: Why is it that indie hackers are so open with sharing numbers? What's the benefit of that?
Courtland: I think it's just a, consequence of the infinite distribution provided by the internet. Anyone can put up any sort of website, whether it's true, whether it's fake news, whether it's credible or whether it's good, whether it's bad. If you write something that engages people and you figure it out, how to distribute it, then you can get the eyeballs.
It means that there's just more information out there for people to learn from, if you go to indiehackers.com/interviews, there's like 500 stories there where people say:
Here's how I came up with my idea. Here's exactly how much money I'm making today. Here's what I was thinking I wrote the first few lines of code. It's an immensely useful resource for learning how to do things cause everybody's so transparent. And then when you go out there, you want to pay it forward because you learn from all these transparent people and so you're more likely to be transparent yourself.
James: Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned that you've got over 500 interviews on the site you're 173 episodes of the podcast - you speak to a lot of indie hackers. What is your view on the current state of bootstrapping, where there are so many people now starting businesses and seeing this as an opportunity where they've got a little bit extra time?
Courtland: Yeah, I think Indie Hackers is bigger than ever. You mentioned bootstrapping in particular, it's funny, I've seen the erosion of the line between bootstrapping and fundraising in the last four or five years. People, when I started Indie Hackers were so religious and dogmatic about bootstrapping, and I kind of was too. But now we're seeing more investors who are figuring out models that allow them to fund these smaller indie hacker type projects and still make a return on their investment.
If you're an indie hacker and now there are options where you don't even have to quit your job or take a leap or, work on the side of your job and you can actually just get some funding. That's just another force that's gonna spur people to start more and more businesses.
James: Definitely. Courtland, we'll end on a few quick fire questions.
First of all, who's an indie hacker you admire or who should people follow?
Courtland: Lynne Tye. One of my best friends is just absolutely crushing it with her website, Key Values. Rosie Sherry, obviously. She's one of the first people that I interviewed for Indie Hackers. But it's hard to pick like a favorite indie hacker.
James: What about your favorite book for indie hackers to read?
Courtland: uh, the books that have helped me the most are books, like Thinking Fast and Slow. Sapiens. And then maybe particularly for indie hackers, there's a book called Hooked, which talks all about habit formation and what goes into the products and devices and apps and websites that allow us to form habits that we have positive associations within our life.
So I think that's a really good book and it's really influenced my thinking and how I build Indie Hackers.
James: A great list of books. What about podcasts?
Courtland: My favorite podcast is. Conversations with Tyler, which has nothing to do with indie hackers. But again, I think it's good to listen broadly. I've recently become a big fan of the Indie Bites podcast with James McKinven. But there's just such a growing and vibrant ecosystem of podcasts out there. It's hard to pick a favorite.
James: Some more great options. And then finally, what are you most excited about for the future? Both in personal life and business. I know you're on a trip away from San Francisco at the moment.
Courtland: Yeah, I'm really excited about just getting older. A lot of people hate getting older, but I've recently become more at peace with it. My friend said:
"Getting older as a privileged, denied to many" and looking at it through that lens. I think I've really just appreciated getting older and wiser and calmer.
James: Awesome. Courtland again, thank you so much for coming on fantastic as ever.
Courtland: Thanks, James.
James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bites. I hope you feel as inspired as I do after listening to this conversation with Courtland.
If you'd like to hear more, there's actually a 45 minute extended version of this episode available to my mailing list subscribers. So if you'd like to listen head over to indiebites.co pop your email into the subscribe field, and I'll send you the extended conversation.
If you find this episode useful what i'd love you to share it with just one other indie hacker that will also find it useful. It really does help the podcast grow.
As always you'll find links to everything we discussed in the show notes. That's all from me. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a learning platform dedicated to mindful productivity while also studying neuroscience part-time at King's College with her masters. Previously Anne-Laure worked at Google leaving that job in 2017. As part of Ness Labs, she creates some truly exceptional content that I've had shared with me time and time again, which is evidenced by her 19,000 strong email lists for her newsletter, Maker Mind.
Here's what we covered in this episode:
On Ness Labs
- Tell me a little about your back story and why you started Ness Labs?
- What is Ness Labs?
- When did you start generating revenue?
- What have you done to grow the membership & newsletter subscribers?
- Neuroscience at King's College on the side! How does that help you research and write articles?
- You're a proponent of building in public, what are the benefits of this for indie hackers?
- You have a sizeable audience, how do you cut through the noise / deal with the inbound?
- What advice would you give to aspiring female indie hackers navigating a male-dominated sector?
On mindful productivity
- What is mindful productivity?
- You're a prolific writer, how do you get so much done?!
- Time management article
- It can be long and hard to grow a side-project / business, how do you stay motivated?
- As indie hackers, what are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed?
- Taking care of yourself. Sleep, taking breaks, journaling. Why is it important and why do so many people neglect it?
Quick fire
- Favourite book is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
- Anne-Laure doesn't listen to podcasts 😱
- Follow Marie Denis, Steph Smith and Rosie Sherry
Follow Anne-Laure
- Ness Labs
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Full Transcript
James: Anne-Laure, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
Anne-Laure: Great. Thanks for having me.
James: Good to have you. Tell me a little bit more about Ness Labs for people who don't know? What's it all about?
Anne-Laure: Ness Labs is a platform for ambitious makers, knowledge workers, creators who want to be their most productive and creative without sacrificing or mental health, and so it offers content, a community, and also coaching for people to achieve these goals.
James: Yeah. And where did you come up with the idea?
Anne-Laure: I both at Google and while working at startups, I went through burnout and I think lots of ambitious people have this experience at some point in their work life. And when I was looking for resources to help me go through this, there's actually wasn't much out there. So it started with this goal of helping people really taking care of their mental health at work.
I've always been fascinated with how the mind works, how the brain works, how do we think, or where do ideas come from? How do we make decisions? So that's always been an area that I've been really curious about.
James: Yeah, absolutely. Where are you at now in terms of subscribers and revenue with Ness Labs? And was it always generating revenue?
Anne-Laure: So in the first six months of Ness Labs, most of the revenue was coming from sponsors. And I didn't really like this model because it meant having to chase them, a lot of back and forth. Also quite irregular revenue where some weeks, I have three sponsors reaching out and saying, "hey, can I start with the newsletter?"
and some weeks there was no one. I figured that really wanted to have some recurring revenue that I could, even if it was growing slowly, sell something that is a bit more stable. And at this point I have about 600 members and the Ness Labs community generating about $3,000 a month.
And that doesn't include all of the, one time revenue that nest labs leaking through books and other products that I'm selling.
James: It's amazing how you've grown it and I think that there'll be a lot of indie hackers who are at that level where they're trying to build something up and deciding on a monetization model. Why at the start did you go for the sponsorship route and also, how did you start to build your newsletter list, which made it appealing for sponsors?
Anne-Laure: At the very beginning, with the sponsors, I didn't really have any outbound process. I just grew the newsletter and I made it clear with the little inserts and signed it, that there was a spot here. So if any reader was also either an entrepreneur or working at a company that was relevant to the audience, I was reaching that they could just reply back and claim that spot for the next newsletter. There was no outbound work, but I think that making it very clear that this spot existed and also having a very niche topic made it appealing to sponsors because they could in one go reach a certain amount of people.
The audience; I can really think Twitter, I think, for most of my subscribers.
James: How beneficial has that Twitter following been for you? Cause you have about 30,000 Twitter followers. And over how long was that built? Was there a specific time where you just started growing or was it quite linear?
Anne-Laure: It was very linear and slow for years and I think up to two years ago, I only have 3000 followers. It took off pretty recently. And I think it's because I really changed the way I used it. I used to just post whatever articles I was reading, not really contributing value.
Whereas now I'm really trying to help people and I really use Twitter to work public. So I really show people my process. I show unfinished articles. Sometimes I ask questions.
I do polls where I really ask the community, what do you think about this? Should I write about this or that? And I think the fact that I switched from just broadcasting content on Twitter, to working in public with the garage door open, has been one of the main reasons why my following has grown so fast in the past year.
I think lots of entrepreneurs make the mistake of falling prey to the planning fallacy. Where you spend so much time trying to figure out how am I going to go about this? What's the best framework to build this? And which library should I use? And how am I going to do this and that? And I think for me, building in public is a way to fight the planning fallacy, where instead of waiting until they have something absolutely perfect that I can put in the world, I just share little nuggets of my progress and I can get feedback much quicker.
So it shortens the feedback loop too, which is especially I think for indie hackers that don't have a lot of resources, is a great thing to do because instead of wasting a lot of time and money potentially going in the wrong direction, you can very quickly adjust. And so that's, for me, that's one of the main benefits of working in public.
James: You talk about mindful productivity a lot. What is mindful productivity?
Anne-Laure: So a lot of the productivity strategies and content that is out there are really about getting things done. It's about productivity for the sake of productivity and it's about getting as much stuff done as possible. Mindful productivity is about taking a step back and asking yourself, do I really need to do this thing?
Am I the right person to do it? Is it the best way to go about it? And it's really about being mindful of the way you work, the way you think, the way you feel. So you can be your most productive while also taking care of your mental health. So you can work on something and being there for the long run. And I think it's particularly relevant for indie hackers, where very often you're a solo entrepreneur.
You're the only person having to wear all of these hats and do all of these things. And as we mentioned, there's just so many hours in a day.
James: Sometimes they might feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff they've got going on, all the different hats they've got to wear, prioritization and maybe some even struggle with loneliness. What are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed?
Anne-Laure: The most important thing is to create space for self-reflection. A big mistake that we make, especially when we're passionate about our business is to keep on pushing through. And when we do this, we very often miss some early signs of potential burnout and burnout can actually be quite easy to manage if you catch it early.
So making sure that however busy things get, creating that space and that time for self reflection and for really thinking about how do I feel right now? Am I feeling rested? Am I feeling tired? Am I feeling anxious? Am I feeling excited? Do I have enough time for thinking about what I'm doing right now versus just going through my to do list, without any reflection.
So that's, for me, the number one most important thing when it comes to mindful productivity is taking that time, and it can take different forms. In my case, I block one hour every Sunday evening where I just write and journal. I look at what went well, what didn't and what I want to focus on for the next week.
Other people find that having a thinking buddy is also helpful, where you have one person and every week you block an hour and you literally ask yourself, how are you doing? How is your week? And what do you expect from the coming week? So there's lots of different ways to go about it, but creating that space and blocking time for it is the most helpful thing.
James: Why do you think a lot of solo founders and indie hackers tend to neglect that?
Anne-Laure: There is a lot of toxic productivity advice out there where some successful entrepreneurs talk about how the wake up at 5:00 AM and then they go for another run and they work until then 10:00 PM. And they also miraculously have time to see their friends and family.
This is toxic. I'm not saying they're lying. If this is really the life you're living every day, this is really their routine, good for them. That works for you, but projecting what works for you onto other people and creating this insecurity for other entrepreneurs, we're thinking,
"Oh, I'm not as productive as I should be, because look at this person."
So I think definitely one reason is all of the productivity porn that is out there and that's giving a false image of what productivity to read looks like and what can you achieve.
And the second thing is, geuinely people being passionate about their work. When it's your own business, very often, you care a lot more than if you're working for another company and that's a good thing, but that also needs to be managed. So managing your passion is also a very important thing.
James: Yeah, I'm from the outside Anne-Laure, you're a prolific writer. How do you get so much done?
Anne-Laure: I block time for the things that matter. And I don't mean blocking time by filling my whole... if you look at my calendar right now, it's almost empty. And I block time for the things that I really want to achieve each week. So for example, I have an hour and a half blocked every morning to write. Every Monday I look at my calendar and I'm like, okay, what are the top three things that I really need to do this week? And I make sure they happen. If the rest doesn't happen, that's completely fine. So I don't actually think I get more done than other people, but I really focus my efforts on the few things that I really think matter.
James: I'll leave a link to your time management article, where you actually have a screenshot of your calendar with some of those recurring events in the show notes.
I'd like to sort of round off on a topic which is women indie hackers in this community that is male dominated, both indie hackers and tech. What advice would you give to both, women in the hackers and us guys on what we can do to help include female indie hackers?
Anne-Laure: I'm very lucky that very early on in my indie hacker hacker journey I found a group called Women Make . It's led by a woman called Marie who's amazing and has fostered this great, inclusive community where women can come and talk about their business and their challenges and ask questions and work together.
So my advice for women who are looking to connect with other women who are also solo entrepreneurs would be to join that group.
James: What about the guys? What should we do be more inclusive?
Anne-Laure: There are a few things that I think would be helpful. First, if you're on Twitter and you ever do these threads where you're listing other entrepreneurs or resources that are helpful to other people, just check the list very quickly and see if there are women in it. And that seems like a simple thing, but the number of times I see those lists of saying, here are the best entrepreneurs in that field and there's no women in it.
And the second thing in your interaction with women also online, don't assume they don't know what they're talking about. So many interactions where I post something and obviously Twitter only has 280 characters and so I just post a short version, the number of mansplaining that I get sometimes where I have men jumping in my replies and saying, Oh, actually also this and this. And I know. I actually study those things. It's a tweet. You would not be doing this to another man, but you're doing this to me.
James: Yeah, I think that's sound advice. And thanks for being open about it. On that thing we'll round up on a few quick fire questions. The first one being who are some good female in the hackers that we can all follow?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, so I'll have so many. Marie Denis, who's the founder of Woman Make, first. She's amazing. Steph Smith. who works at The Hustle now, and who's an amazing content expers, SEO experts. There's also 'Clo', who, is a UX researcher and she's doing amazing work, understanding how to create websites that actually convert . There's Rosie, you mentioned who's amazing. And she needs community at Indie Hackers and she also creating her own newsletter and I think right now, 75% of her content is behind a pay wall. And she's spoken about it and experimenting with it . I have so many but that's going to be my like three ones for now.
James: And then final few questions. Best book for indie hackers? I've heard, you mentioned How to Change Your Mind before, so a different book to that.
Anne-Laure: I would recommend 50 great myth of popular psychology.
James: and favorite podcast to listen to, you
Anne-Laure: I don't listen to podcasts.
James: Refreshing to hear. and then finally, what are you most excited about for the future either personally or in business?
Anne-Laure: I think in the future, I'm going to keep on working on the same mission, which is helping people be as creative and productive as possible. I don't know exactly how that's going to look like, but this is also why my company is called Ness Labs. It's really a lab where I can experiment and try new things and see if they work or they don't. So I'm currently working on creating an online course, for example, and if this is something that works, I might create more in the future and if it doesn't, I may take Ness Labs in a different direction.
James: Amazing. Anne-Laure, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed this.
Anne-Laure: Thank you.
Helen Ryles is a prolific indie hacker, having launched over 40 projects in the last 10 years, selling a few of them along the way. Helen is a proponent of the no code movement, advocating for the tools that allow non-technical folks, like me, create amazing projects. To tie in with this, she also runs the community at Makerpad, the no-code education and community platform.
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Here's what we covered in this episode
On side projects
- How did you start indie hacking?
- What are you currently working on?
- Where do you come up with ideas?
- How do you define a side-project?
- Having launched so many, what is your process for getting an idea up and running, validated and then deciding how long you run with it before it gets sold / canned?
- You wrote a great thread on selling side projects. How do you know when it's time to sell?
- How do you sell a side project?!
On no-code
- You joined Makerpad last month to help run their community. Tell me a little bit more about what Makerpad is and what your role will be there.
- What is no-code and why do you think it's important?
- What are some of the most exciting things you've seen people do with no-code?
- What are the non-obvious benefits of no-code?
- What are the best no-code tools?
Recommendations
- Book: Authority
- Podcast: Side Hustle School
- Indie Hacker: Michael Gill
Follow Helen
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
[Full transcription coming soon]
Harry Dry is the founder of Marketing Examples, a fast-growing showcase of successful startup marketing stories. When I first spoke to Harry on the Marketing Mashup about a year ago, he was on 5,000 subscribers and £1k revenue. Now, he has 6x that amount with 30,000 subscribers and 50,000 Twitter followers. An incredible growth story from a smart marketer.
In 2022, Harry also created Copywriting Examples, the site for anyone writing new copy.
Here's what we covered in this episode:
On Marketing Examples
- I've given a little summary of Marketing Examples, how would you describe it?
- Where did you come up with the idea?
- How is your revenue shaping up with the audience you have?
- If you could choose one case study as your favourite, which one would it be?
On Audience Building
- When you first started Marketing Examples, how did you get your first 100 subscribers?
- You're an expert on Twitter, now with 50k followers. What did it take to grow a Twitter audience so large, so quickly?
- What's been the biggest struggle building Marketing Examples?
- What advice would you give to other indie hackers trying to build an audience?
- Talk me through your decision to add a new personal touch to Marketing Examples?
- Tell me the Kanye Story in 30 seconds
Recommendations
- Book: Man's Search for Meaning
- Podcast: IFL TV
- Indie Hacker: Pat Walls
Links
- Follow Harry on Twitter
- Marketing Examples
- Marketing Examples Twitter
Follow Me
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
In this episode we discuss:
On Ramen Club (formerly Weekend Club)
- How would you describe Ramen Club?
- Where did you come up with the idea for Ramen Club & IndieBeers?
- What was your initial plan for making revenue with Ramen Club?
- What's your revenue now?
- What have you done specifically to grow those first few users?
On Community Building
- You've cultivated quite the community in London, why did you choose to build the community here?
- What does it take to build an active community? Is it as simple as just setting up a Slack and a Stripe account and away you go?
- What's been the biggest struggle building the community?
- What advice would you give to other indie hackers trying to build a community?
Recommendations
- Book: Influence
- Podcast: The Knowledge Project
- Indie Hacker: Wilhelm Klopp
Links
- Follow Charlie on Twitter
- Ramen Club (formerly Weekend Club)
- Indie London
- Indie Beers
Follow Me
👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
I'm your host James McKinven, I'm the founder of a podcasting company called Striqo and passionate indie hacker.
Now I love long podcasts and what Courtland Allen has done with the Indie Hackers show, but this podcast will just supplement that. With less commuting, we now have less time to listen to podcasts and those long, albeit interesting, backstories. I'll aim to cut to the chase and find out what it really takes to build a sustainable, profitable business on the side.
I'm James, I run a podcast company called Striqo and I love hearing about the ups and downs of what it takes to be an indie hacker.
I'm a fellow indie hacker and side-project-starter and I love hearing the stories of other makers who have started their businesses while working a full-time job.
Whether that's a small little earner on the side or something that has grown into tens of thousands of ££ income that means you could quit your job.
Having started many of my own side-projects I know how hard it is to get it off the ground and generate revenue. I wouldn't have been able to make progress on any of my projects if it wasn't for the kindness and support I've received from everyone in the Indie Hackers community.
Everyone has a story to tell, advice they can give and lessons to teach - I want to share them with as many people as I can.
I hope you can join me for this podcast talking to our favourite indie hackers.
If you like the sound of this, please subscribe to the podcast and tweet me which indie hacker you'd like me to feature.