Indie Bites (James McKinven)
Explore every episode of Indie Bites
| Pub. Date | Title | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Apr 2022 | Building a mentorship platform to $1m GMV - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise | 00:15:13 | |
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:
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Follow Dom Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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. | |||
| 15 Mar 2023 | Making $12k p/m with Wordpress plugins - Patrick Posner | 00:15:39 | |
Patrick Posner is the creator of a portfolio of Wordpress plugins which have been downloaded almost a million times collectively making him $12k p/m. Patrick went full time indie in 2020 and since then has both grown quickly and scaled back operations to build the best sort of life for him. I love these types of stories of relatively unknown indie hackers who are creating the dream life for themselves. What we covered in this episode:
Recommendations
Follow Patrick My links
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 | |||
| 03 Feb 2022 | Growing to $8.5k MRR in 1 year - Marie Martens, Tally.so | 00:14:46 | |
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:
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Follow Marie Follow Me 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. | |||
| 10 Mar 2023 | From $50m VC-backed to $20k MRR notes app - Alex MacCaw, Reflect (prev. Clearbit) | 00:16:58 | |
Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a note taking app which he’s grown to $20k MRR with a team of 4. Previously, he was the co-founder of Clearbit, a VC-backed company that scaled to $50m in revenue. After stepping down as CEO of Clearbit, he decided to focus on doing the stuff he enjoys. So he’s sailing around the world building an app that gets him excited every day. 👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co. What we covered in this episode:
Recommendations
Follow Alex My links
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 | |||
| 13 Dec 2023 | Scaling and exiting a $65k MRR with meal planning app - Jeffrey Bunn, Mealime & Clearful | 00:17:14 | |
Today I’m joined by Jeffrey Bunn, who is the co-founder of Clearful, a digital journal app he built with his wife, Maria. Previously they co-founded Mealime, a meal planning app which grew to a whopping $65k MRR before they exited in 2018. In this episode we cover the story of founding both apps, how they utilised the app stores for growth and why they started a B2C app in a crowded market. Timestamps Recommendations
My links
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. | |||
| 04 Apr 2022 | Bootstrapping a portfolio of SaaS products to $3k MRR - Jim Raptis, BrandBird | 00:15:30 | |
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
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Follow Jim Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
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. | |||
| 29 Sep 2021 | $250 to $3k MRR in 4 months with a Notion website builder - Noah Bragg, Potion | 00:15:06 | |
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:
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Follow Me 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. | |||
| 24 Jan 2024 | Building and monetizing an audience as a software engineer - Randall Kanna Franson | 00:16:58 | |
Today I’m joined by Randall Kanna Franson. Randall is a senior software engineer who has written 3 books, including one published by O’Reilly and a self published one which made over $70k. She also created a course called Hack the Tech interview which made $20k in the first 24 hours and $50k in the first month. All of this has been through Randall’s efforts to share her learnings from almost a decade being a software engineer and growing her twitter audience to over 50,000 followers. She’s also dabbled in SaaS products, notably launching and growing CodeTutor which she sold after the birth of her first child. Timestamps
Recommendations
My links
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. | |||
| 08 Apr 2022 | Why your product needs marketing - Dagobert Renouf, Logology | 00:15:35 | |
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. What we covered in this episode:
Recommendations
Follow Dago Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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. | |||
| 18 Nov 2020 | Making a full-time income working just one day per week - Ramy Khuffash, Page Flows | 00:15:23 | |
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:
Recommendations
Follow Ramy Follow Me 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. | |||
| 24 Mar 2021 | Build in a competitive market, or go niche? - Derrick Reimer, SavvyCal | 00:15:51 | |
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:
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Follow Derrick Follow Me 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. | |||
| 21 Sep 2023 | Making $200k a year teaching Google Sheets - Andrew Kamphey | 00:14:48 | |
Today I’m joined by Andrew Kamphey, who is the founder of Better Sheets, a platform of tools and tutorials to get better at using Google Sheets, that has done well over $200k in revenue since he launched in 2020. He started out working as a tech on cruise ships, before moving to LA to work in the film industry, which is where he gained all of his Google Sheets prowess. From here he’s had a meandering life journey, working while travelling South East Asia, starting and selling an influencer newsletter, writing a book about charging and even launching a SaaS. Andrew has had his finger in piece of the indie hacking pie and has now settled on being the Google Sheets guy. At least for now. Timestamps
Recommendations
Follow Andrew My links
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. | |||
| 08 Nov 2023 | Bootstrapping EmailOctopus to $3m+ ARR - Jonathan Bull & Tom Evans | 00:17:11 | |
Today I’m joined by Tom Evans and Jonathan Bull from EmailOctopus, an email platform who have bootstrapped to over $3m ARR since they were founded in 2014. They’ve been battling in a crowded and competitive market, with some huge funded companies to contend with, but they’ve made it work in an indie way. In this episode we talk about how they lost 99% of their users overnight, why they’ve chosen to compete on price rather than in a niche and their reasoning behind staying bootstrapped for so long. Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership
Recommendations
Guest Links My links
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. | |||
| 01 Nov 2023 | Building a financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson | 00:15:48 | |
In this episode I have a returning guest, someone who is a keystone of the bootstrapping community, it’s Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor, MegaMaker and more. Today we have an unstructured but very useful chat about building a financial engine for your business. This is a topic that has come up countless times in my indie journey and I think it’s something that a lot of indie businesses don’t address as early and seriously as they should. There a ton of actionable tips in this conversation about how to manage your finances, building a solid, profitable business and what to do when things aren’t going well. Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership Timestamps
Recommendations (from prev ep)
Follow Justin My links
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 | |||
| 10 May 2024 | Building a $200k MRR bootstrapped maid software for a price sensitive niche - Amar Ghose, ZenMaid | 00:16:50 | |
Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid, a Maid Service software that has just hit $200k MRR. Amar is a seasoned bootstrapped entrepreneur, having started ZenMaid back in 2013. Amar’s story shows the power of sticking with something through the hard times, and having an unsexy niche (aka not selling to other indie hackers) can lead to a phenomenal indie business. Timestamps
Reccos
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. | |||
| 15 Nov 2023 | How to get to ramen profitability - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club | 00:15:49 | |
Today is a special episode, because it marks 100 episodes of Indie Bites. And to mark the occasion, I’m bringing back my guest from episode 1, Charlie Ward, founder of Ramen Club to talk about how he’s grown to community into the core of the London indie scene while scaling to £7k MRR in the process. Charlie has also been a long time supporter of the show, having sponsored well over 30 episodes and taking a bet on me early on. Timestamps
Recommendations
Other links My links
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. | |||
| 25 Jul 2021 | Bootstrapping Transistor.fm to 13,000+ podcasts - Justin Jackson, Transistor.fm | 00:16:28 | |
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:
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Follow Justin Follow Me 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. | |||
| 15 Jan 2021 | Making over $5k/month from a portfolio of side projects - Dan Rowden, ilo | 00:15:36 | |
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:
Dan also launched ilo, a better analytics platform for Twitter a few months ago, which has earned over $6k in revenue since launch.
Recommendations
Follow Dan Follow Me 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. | |||
| 14 Jun 2021 | Making $10k in a weekend selling emoji email addresses - Ben Stokes, Tiny Projects | 00:16:49 | |
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:
Recommendations
Follow Ben Follow Me | |||
| 05 Aug 2021 | Founder Hot Seat - Overcoming mental health challenges [Bonus] | 00:19:44 | |
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.
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 Follow Me | |||
| 04 Oct 2022 | Bootstrapping, AppSumo deals and productivity tools - Macgill Davis / Will Goto, Rize.io | 00:16:27 | |
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. Join the membership for extended conversations 👈 What we covered in this episode:
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Follow Follow Me
Sponsor - Figura Head to figura.digital to try it out. | |||
| 26 Sep 2022 | Bootstrapping Helpkit to $4.5k MRR - Dominik Sobe, Helpkit | 00:15:05 | |
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:
Recommendations
Follow Dominik Follow Me
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. | |||
| 02 Nov 2022 | Bootstrapping to $3.5m ARR from YouTuber to Founder - Sam King, Flick | 00:14:39 | |
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:
Recommendations
Follow Follow Me
Sponsor - Figura Head to figura.digital to try it out. | |||
| 29 Nov 2023 | Arvid Kahl on side projects, hobbies and making money as a founder | 00:17:06 | |
Arvid Kahl runs The Bootstrapped Founder, a podcast, newsletter and educational resource to help founders grow successful bootstrapped businesses. He’s also written two books, Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entreprenuer. Arvid is a returning guest, having previously been on the show almost 3 years ago, to talk about his exit from FeedbackPanda, which he grew to $55k MRR with his partner, Danielle.
👉 Get the full 55 minute conversation here. Timestamps
Recommendations (Prev. the mom test, IH pod and Sergio Mattei)
My links
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. | |||
| 09 Aug 2024 | How focusing on customer happiness led to success for KnowledgeOwl - Marybeth Alexander | 00:16:10 | |
Marybeth Alexander is the founder and Chief Executive Owl of KnowledgeOwl, a bootstrapped knowledge base software founded in 2015. Started as an idea within SurveyGizmo, where Marybeth was working at the time, the company has since flourished into a small, profitable, sustainable business ultimately being built to improve the lives of the founders, employees and customers. In this episode we talk about how Marybeth bought the company from her previous employers, how they grew through reviews and why more indie hackers should put customer happiness front and centre. Timestamps
Recommendations
My links
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. | |||
| 03 Apr 2024 | Bootstrapping the 100DaysOfNoCode learning platform - Max Haining | 00:15:45 | |
Max Haining is the founder of 100DaysofNoCode and 100DaysofAI, which are bootcamps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills. Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100DaysofNoCode as a challenge for himself to learn NoCode tools during covid, but as more people joined in, he realised he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform which he’s now working on full time. Follow Max: Timestamps
Recommendations
My links
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. | |||
| 10 Apr 2024 | Building a $700k ARR newsletter - Manu Cinca, Stacked Marketer | 00:16:12 | |
Manu Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter he bootstrapped to $700k. In 2023, he acquired 2 newsletters to bring the subscriber count to 100k and raised a small 250k funding round to help boost growth. | |||
| 15 Jan 2022 | 4 years of failed projects to full-time indie hacker - Kenneth Cassel, Pointer.gg | 00:15:58 | |
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:
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Follow Kenneth Follow Me 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 | |||
| 08 Feb 2022 | Mental health as a founder and the importance of community - Tom Ross, Design Cuts | 00:15:34 | |
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:
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Follow Tom Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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. | |||
| 14 May 2022 | Growing Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling to Github - Grey Baker, Dependabot | 00:16:15 | |
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
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| 15 Oct 2020 | What it takes to build a community - Rosie Sherry, Indie Hackers | 00:15:22 | |
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:
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Follow Rosie Follow Me 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. | |||
| 03 Aug 2023 | Carving a new life path with a newsletter about Workspaces - Ryan Gilbert, Workspaces | 00:15:32 | |
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
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| 16 Apr 2025 | Why Jack Ellis acquired Fathom Analytics from his co-founder | 00:14:10 | |
Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, a simple, privacy focused analytics tool launched in 2019. I last spoke to Jack on the podcast in 2021, where he talked about the inception and growth of Fathom, taking on a massive incumbent and why Jack loves working with a co-founder. In December 2024, Jack acquired his co-founder’s share in the business, making him the sole owner (i think). Today, we’re going to talk about why he made this unique move and what’s next for Fathom. Timestamps
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| 14 Jun 2024 | Ranking #1 in Google with Lorem Ipsum and making a career out of scientific SEO - Kyle Roof | 00:14:51 | |
Kyle Roof is the co-founder of High Voltage SEO, PageOptimizer Pro and Internet Marketing Gold. An agency, software and course business respectively which all focus on mastering SEO. I’ve spoken at length on the podcast before about how SEO can be such an effective tool for indie hackers to use, so Kyle is the perfect guest to talk to today. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 27 Mar 2024 | Bouncing back from losing 70% revenue - Max Serrano, IGotAnOffer | 00:15:37 | |
Max Serrano is the founder of IGotAnOffer, a bootstrapped coaching platform focused on helping people get jobs and progress their career. Initially starting out in consulting, Max started IGotAnOffer on the side, creating digital products to help people land consulting jobs, but pivoted to coaching after they lost 70% of their revenue in the tech hiring freeze, having to lay off the majority of his staff. Now, with a profit first mentality, they are on a growth trajectory again. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 04 Sep 2020 | Indie Bites Trailer - what's it all about? | 00:01:39 | |
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. | |||
| 05 Apr 2023 | Building a 6-figure creator business - Jay Clouse, Creator Science | 00:16:31 | |
Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, which is a membership, community, newsletter and podcast helping you become build a creator business, which he bootstrapped to over $40k a month towards the end of last year. His podcast is one of the best produced shows out there and it’s on my very short list of shows that I can listen to every episode and know it’s going to be killer. I think the creator business angle is interesting for indie hackers who haven’t quite found a product yet and want to build something. Creating content and speaking to people in your niche, can help you find pain points and problems, while also building extra income for yourself. Timestamps
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| 26 Apr 2022 | Bootstrapped founder running 3 profitable businesses - Monica Lent, Affilimate | 00:15:17 | |
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:
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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. | |||
| 31 Oct 2020 | Paying off $250k in debt by starting a company making $1.5m ARR - Nick Fogle, Wavve | 00:15:46 | |
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:
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| 07 May 2022 | r/SaaS moderator making $6k MRR with his own SaaS - CH Daniel, Simple.ink | 00:14:42 | |
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:
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| 07 Feb 2025 | How Justin Duke is building Buttondown into the perfect bootstrapped business | 00:17:17 | |
Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email tool he launched in 2017. Justin was last on the podcast 2 years ago when he’d hit $15k MRR and just left his role at Stripe to focus on Buttondown. I was struck by Justin’s well thought through approach to building. He makes calculated risks and shares a lot of his learnings on his blog, Applied Cartography (which is an essential read for any indie hackers). This episode I catch up with Justin to hear how he’s grown the team to 8 people and his approach to building a company he loves. This is a cut down version of an hour long catch up I had with Justin available on the Indie Bites membership which is available at indiebites.com/membership, where we discuss his personal blog, how he structures his time as a new parent and we go deeper into hiring high agency unicorns. Timestamps
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| 03 May 2022 | Multiple successful exits to making lemonade - JR Farr, Lemon Squeezy | 00:16:26 | |
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:
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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.
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. | |||
| 05 Oct 2023 | Growing an audience, making difficult decisions and launching screencasting.com - Aaron Francis | 00:16:53 | |
Aaron Francis is currently an Educator at Planet Scale, but you would have seen him all around the internet doing courses, YouTube videos, podcasts and more. Notably he was a founding member of the Hammerstone team, which he’s recently left, to focus his energy on doing something he loves. Most recently, Aaron has launched Screencasting.com, a course teaching you how to make better screencasts. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 12 Apr 2023 | Growing a $2m p/y indie business - Josh Ho, Referral Rock | 00:16:30 | |
Josh Ho is the founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a SaaS he founded in 2014 doing over $2m a year in revenue. Referral Rock helps businesses to design, launch and manage a customer referral program. Josh has had decades of experience as a founder, pouring his early entrepreneurship energy into a notes app that he ultimately couldn’t monetize. Timestamps Recommendations
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| 22 Jan 2025 | How to sell your indie business - Josh Peleg | 00:15:10 | |
Today I’m not actually joined by an indie hacker, but by someone who can help a lot of indies out there. Josh Peleg is the Head of Biz Dev and Mergers and Acquisitions at BlueThrone. Essentially, he knows all about how to sell a business from the buyer's side. In this episode we’re going to learn from Josh exactly what you need to know about selling your indie product. How you find an acquirer, what does the process look like and how you can get a deal over the line. I’ve spoken to some indie hackers who have gone through exits, such as Rob Walling, Ramy Khuffash, Tibo Louis Lucas and more, but not so much from the other side. Let’s find out what it takes. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 25 Apr 2024 | Building WP Minute, a 5-figure side project without a huge audience - Matt Medeiros, WP Minute | 00:16:28 | |
Matt Medeiros is the founder of WP Minute, a weekly podcast highlighting WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. He’s a podcasting expert, having previously worked as Director of Podcasting success at Castos and now hosts & produces Breakdown, a podcast by Gravity forms. This episode talks about how you can make a sustainable 5-figure side project, with a niche audience while working a full time job and increasing your opportunities as you do it. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 21 Jul 2023 | Taking on Bit.ly bootstrapped - Tim Leland, T.LY | 00:16:19 | |
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.
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| 16 Sep 2020 | Starting over 40 side-projects in 10 years - Helen Ryles | 00:15:07 | |
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.
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| 22 Aug 2022 | How to build in public - Kevon Cheung, Public Lab | 00:16:01 | |
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 Chaos. What we covered in this episode:
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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.
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. | |||
| 20 Mar 2021 | How to build a business you actually enjoy - Natalie Nagele, Wildbit | 00:15:37 | |
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:
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Follow Natalie Follow Me 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. | |||
| 08 Aug 2022 | How to build a brand for your indie product - Marie Ng, Llama Life | 00:15:06 | |
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:
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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.
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. | |||
| 23 Jan 2021 | Making $15k in 24 hours selling a book on Gumroad - Philip Kiely, Gumroad | 00:15:30 | |
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:
Follow Philip Follow Me 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. | |||
| 13 Oct 2021 | Growing Upvoty to $17k MRR - Mike Slaats, Upvoty | 00:15:47 | |
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
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Follow Mike Follow Me 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. | |||
| 15 Sep 2021 | Bootstrapping to over $250k MRR - Baird Hall, Churnkey | 00:16:15 | |
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:
Follow Me 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. | |||
| 15 Jan 2025 | Arvid Kahl on building a profitable SaaS (Podscan), calm funding and juggling a media business | 00:16:44 | |
Arvid Kahl is returning to the podcast for the third time. In 2019, he’d just sold Feedback Panda for a life changing amount of money and then wrote the book Zero to Sold. In 2023, he was in full-on creator mode with The Bootstrapped Founder and had just released The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now, he’s still producing the content but is also spending time on his SaaS Podscan, which is an extremely ambitious tool that transcribes every podcast and let’s you track mentions of your brand. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 30 Apr 2023 | Growing Frontend Mentor to 500k users and $30k MRR - Matt Studdert | 00:16:02 | |
Matt Studdert is the founder of Frontend Mentor, which helps people level up their front-end coding skills by building projects. They have over 500,000 users and are hovering around $30k MRR. Matt didn’t start out wanting to run a SaaS, starting out playing poker, then became a personal trainer, before changing his career and learning to code when he was 28. Timestamps:
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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. | |||
| 08 Mar 2023 | Stair stepping to millions in SaaS revenue - Craig Hewitt, Castos | 00:16:37 | |
Craig Hewitt is the Founder and CEO of Castos, a bootstrapped podcast hosting and analytics platform with a services arm for podcast production. He’s been in podcasting almost a decade, having started his own show, Rogue Startups and his production service Podcast Motor (which he folded into Castos). Craig not only shares his ponderings on his show, but he also writes a weekly newsletter called Founder Insights. What we covered in this episode:
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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 | |||
| 11 Jan 2021 | Turning $100 into $52,000 selling handmade candles DTC - Dianna Allen, TERRA | 00:15:25 | |
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:
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Follow Dianna Follow Me 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. | |||
| 01 Jun 2023 | Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise | 00:15:47 | |
In this episode I’m bringing back a previous guest, Dom Monn, who is the founder of MentorCruise, which he’s now working full time on with a small team. I brought Dom back on to discuss something that has been on my mind, and has come up in twitter conversations recently which Dom has been involved in. Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? Is the indie label and mentality limiting success and holding many founders back? I think it could be and so we discuss why this might be happening and what we can do about it. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 13 Sep 2024 | How Podsqueeze grew to $16k MRR in 18 months - Tiago Ferreira | 00:15:39 | |
Tiago Ferreira is the co-founder of Podsqueeze, an AI podcast tool that helps automate your podcast content. The tool, that helps you create show notes, newsletters, social posts and more, is currently doing $16k MRR and growing. You might also know Tiago from his podcast Wannabe Entrepreneur, where he’s interviewed impressive founders including Pieter Levels. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 08 Nov 2021 | Leaving a $500k job to build a portfolio of small bets - Daniel Vassallo | 00:16:24 | |
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:
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More on Daniel Follow Me 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 | |||
| 28 Oct 2021 | Taking on Google with Fathom Analytics and growing a course to $150k - Jack Ellis, Fathom | 00:15:22 | |
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:
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Follow Jack Follow Me 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 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. | |||
| 18 Sep 2020 | $3k MRR with 600 paying members writing about mindful productivity - Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs | 00:15:46 | |
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
On mindful productivity
Quick fire
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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... | |||
| 16 Mar 2022 | Gumroad founder's framework for a bootstrapped business - Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad | 00:15:07 | |
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:
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Follow Sahil Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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.so or hit the link in the show notes and use the code INDIEBITES to get 25% off your ilo subscription for life. | |||
| 31 Oct 2021 | From $500k to $1m in 6 months with a podcast agency - Harry Morton, Lowerstreet | 00:16:31 | |
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:
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Follow Harry Follow Me 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. | |||
| 23 Feb 2021 | Lessons learned bootstrapping and selling a $55k p/m SaaS - Arvid Kahl, TheBootstrappedFounder | 00:15:45 | |
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:
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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'. | |||
| 29 Jan 2022 | Growing to $4m+ despite Apple cloning their product - Matt Ronge, Astropad | 00:16:49 | |
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:
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Follow Matt Follow Me 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. | |||
| 13 Sep 2022 | Solo founder grows reverse job board to $100k a year - Joe Masilotti, RailsDevs | 00:16:18 | |
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:
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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.
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. | |||
| 13 Nov 2021 | From lifelong bootstrapper to raising calm funding - Brian Casel, ZipMessage | 00:15:41 | |
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:
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Follow Brian Follow Me 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 | |||
| 29 Apr 2022 | Behind the success of Trends.vc - Dru Riley, Trends | 00:14:32 | |
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:
Recommendations Follow Dru Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.
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. | |||
| 07 Sep 2020 | Growing a paid community to $800 MRR - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club (prev. Weekend Club) | 00:13:37 | |
In this episode we discuss: On Ramen Club (formerly Weekend Club)
On Community Building
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Links
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| 24 Sep 2020 | How VEED grew to $1.7m ARR in less than 2 years - Sabba Keynejad, Veed.io | 00:15:00 | |
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
On growth and marketing
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Follow Sabba Follow Me 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.
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| 04 Mar 2021 | Building a mid 6-figure Notion course in under a year, solo - Marie Poulin, Notion Mastery | 00:15:28 | |
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:
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Follow Marie Follow Me 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 to ilo.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! | |||
| 06 Sep 2022 | Focusing on one product in a strong market (for 15 years) - Geoff Roberts, Outseta | 00:16:22 | |
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:
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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. | |||
| 15 May 2021 | Struggling with my own mental health | 00:15:02 | |
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:
I mentioned in the pod I'd been making videos about my motorbike, here's a few links if you'd like to watch: and here's how to contact / support me:
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| 01 Dec 2020 | Why indie hackers should be podcasting - Mark Asquith, Rebel Base Media | 00:15:28 | |
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:
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Follow Mark Follow Me 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. | |||
| 14 Jun 2023 | Gamifying products, shipping quickly and knowing when to quit - Marc Louvion | 00:16:09 | |
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
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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. | |||
| 16 Dec 2020 | How Pat Walls made $20k in 2 weeks from his SEO course - Pat Walls, Starter Story | 00:15:32 | |
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
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Follow Pat Follow Me 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. | |||
| 05 Mar 2025 | Typeshare's $34k MRR bootstrapped journey - Sam Shore | 00:15:10 | |
Sam Shore is the co-founder of Typeshare, a writing platform made to create and publish text across the internet. Typeshare has made over $1m in revenue since it was started in 2021, with over 80,000 user, currently $34k MRR I’m speaking to Sam to find out how he started Typeshare as the first of 12 startups he was planning to build, and what made this stick.
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My links
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. | |||
| 20 Oct 2021 | Building a portfolio of projects to $6k in one month - Pete Codes, No CS Degree | 00:16:02 | |
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 (sold) 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
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Follow Pete Follow Me 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. | |||
| 27 Mar 2022 | Candle dealer builds $5k MRR software to solve own problem - Dianna Allen & Jeremy Blalock, Inventora | 00:15:43 | |
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:
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Follow Dianna & Jeremy Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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. | |||
| 10 Sep 2020 | Building Marketing Examples to 30k email subscribers - Harry Dry, Marketing Examples | 00:15:27 | |
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.
On Audience Building
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Links Follow Me 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. | |||
| 16 May 2024 | From Tweet Hunter's 8 figure exit, to starting all over again - Tibo Louis-Lucas | 00:17:19 | |
Tibo Louis-Lucas is a serial founder, most well known for starting Tweet Hunter and Taplio in 2021, before selling the company in 2022 for 8 figures. Since then, Tibo has gone on to acquire an AI video creation tool, Typeframes, which he spun Revid.ai recently. He actually announced after recording this that he has left Tweethunter and is back to focusing on his early stage products, which we touch on in this episode. He’s also started a newsletter with over 50k subscribers and has over 115k Twitter followers. Tibo is a bit of a legend in the indie maker sphere right now. Tibo and I covered so much ground in this episode I couldn’t fit it all in, so the the full 40 minute conversation available on the Indie Bites membership for $60 a year. Head to indiebites.com/membership to get access. Timestamps:
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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. | |||
| 26 Oct 2022 | A masterclass in customer research as a founder - Michele Hansen, Deploy Empathy | 00:16:06 | |
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:
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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.
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. | |||
| 19 Apr 2023 | Jordan O'Connor on running a $30k MRR SaaS and doing SEO consulting on the side | 00:17:03 | |
Jordan O’Connor is the founder of Closet Tools, a bootstrapped app that helps people sell more stuff on Poshmark which has been in and around the $30-40k MRR mark. He’s found a lot of his growth through SEO, like many successful entrepreneurs, and now helps other founders do the same through his Rank to Sell power half hours. Listen to the full 90 minute chat with Jordan here -> Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 19 Oct 2020 | Building a SaaS with just one hour every day - Mubashar Iqbal (Mubs) | 00:15:10 | |
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:
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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. | |||
| 19 Apr 2022 | Bootstrapping Testimonial to $13k MRR after many failed products - Damon Chen, Testimonial | 00:15:49 | |
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:
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Follow Damon Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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! | |||
| 13 Oct 2023 | Rob Walling on multiple projects, why building an audience is dumb and other SaaS wisdom | 00:17:09 | |
Rob Walling is an absolute legend in the bootstrapping and indie scene. He’s a veteran entrepreneur with his most notable exit being Drip in 2016. Rob also founded MicroConf, started TinySeed and is the host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, which has over 680 episodes having started in 2010. It doesn’t stop there for Rob, he’s also written 4 books, Start Small Stay Small, Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together and most recently, The SaaS Playbook. Get the hour long episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 25 Feb 2022 | Building a $15m GMV side-project at 15 years old - Che Sampat, SuperPay | 00:15:42 | |
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
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Follow Che Follow Me 👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays. 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. | |||
| 27 May 2023 | How to find and validate your ideas - Bram Kanstein, Startup Stash / No Code MVP | 00:15:58 | |
Today I’m joined by Bram Kanstein, who you might know from Startup Stash, which is the most upvoted product ever on Product Hunt. Bram also started the No Code MVP a course, which shows you how to launch an MVP without code. In this episode we focus a lot on how indie hackers can find ideas and launch them the right way. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 08 Jan 2025 | High Signal founder on the state of indie hacking and building in public in 2025 - Pete Codes | 00:14:18 | |
Recently I’ve been reviewing my catalogue of previous guests and have been intrigued to see where they are now, so expect to see a few more returning guests over the next few weeks. Today is a chap who was last on the podcast 3 years ago, and is still ever present in the indie community. Pete Codes is writes the High Signal newsletter, sharing all the best indie hacking news every week. He’s making his main living through Ghostwriting for Twitter, Bluesky and LinkedIn, but he’s still launching new projects and keeping his previous projects live. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 25 Mar 2023 | Breaking Convention: The Radical Thinking of Jack McDade and Statamic | 00:16:25 | |
Jack McDade is the creator of Statamic, a content management system for Laravel. What I love about Jack is how he approaches all of his projects, including Statamic, to just be different. There is so much cookie cutter content out there and everything just ends up looking the same - but not if Jack has anything to do with it. Just take a look at his personal website, his Radical Design course and Icons and you’ll see what I mean. I love it. 👉 Join the Indie Bites membership here. Timestamps:
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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 | |||
| 07 Apr 2021 | Growing a podcast to 50k downloads in 6 months - Danny Miranda, The Danny Miranda Show | 00:15:25 | |
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:
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Follow Danny Follow Me 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. | |||
| 18 Nov 2021 | Nailing your marketing as a founder - Peter Suhm, Reform | 00:15:34 | |
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:
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Follow Peter Follow Me 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 | |||
| 17 Mar 2021 | $600 MRR and 150 new users per day with SEO and marketing - Elston Baretto, Tiiny Host | 00:15:34 | |
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:
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Follow Elston Follow Me 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. | |||
| 22 Apr 2022 | Growing ScrapingBee to $1m ARR - Pierre De Wulf, ScrapingBee | 00:14:34 | |
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:
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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. | |||
| 27 Dec 2023 | How VEED bootstrapped to $7m ARR - Sabba Keynejad, VEED.io (2020) | 00:14:23 | |
Today I'm revisiting one of my favourite episodes, from 2020, with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder and CEO of VEED.io, an online video editing platform. When I interviewed Sabba, VEED were at around $2m ARR, fully bootstrapped. Since this interview, they’ve gone on to bootstrap to about $7m ARR before raising a whopping $35m series A from Sequoia. And when I first met Sabba, years before this interview, VEED was just a small product that wasn't generating any revenue. This episode is special to me because I’ve followed VEED’s journey from the start and it’s been inspiring to see. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 11 Jan 2024 | Can you really scale a No Code SaaS? - Kieran Ball, NoCodeLife | 00:16:45 | |
Kieran Ball is the founder of NoCodeLife, a selection of case studies of those making successful businesses using NoCode. Kieran also has courses on how to become a NoCode SaaS founder, specifically using the Bubble platform. I wanted to get Kieran on the pod to discuss and challenge the NoCode movement and if you can actually create a scalable product using the tools available, or if NoCode serves a different purpose. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| 08 Dec 2020 | Choosing freedom over money - Rob Hope, One Page Love + Yo! | 00:15:39 | |
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:
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Follow Rob Follow Me 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. | |||
| 06 Dec 2023 | The slow and steady path to growth - Michael Christofides | 00:16:55 | |
Today I’m joined by Michael Christofides, who is the founder of PgMustard, a product which helps people speed up Postgres queries. Michael started out working for a Devtools company as a product manager and went on to run customer success at London based unicorn, GoCardless. Now, Michael might not be as well known and successful as other popular indie hackers, but he works on his own terms and has been committed to his project for years. In this episode I want to unpack why Michael stays committed to his product despite slow growth, his unique approach to the indie lifestyle and where he wants to go in future. Timestamps
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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. | |||