Short, bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses. You'll learn how they come up with ideas, what they do to validate, find those first customers and make a sustainable income.
Bootstrapping, AppSumo deals and productivity tools - Macgill Davis / Will Goto, Rize.io
Macgill Davis and Will Goto are the founders of Rize, a time-tracking platform that helps you increase your productivity, started in August 2020. Will and Macgill met at a company called Peer, which then got acquired by Twitter, they then left Twitter and founded a company called Humble Dot, which they raised for but unfortunately had to shut down.
What we covered in this episode:
- Working on a side project while at Twitter
- Raising funding then leaving their jobs
- Co-founders with the same technical background
- A different approach to finding a co-founder
- Shutting down a business when it’s not doing well
- Searching for a new idea and solving your own problem
- Creating a landing page and running some ads
- Picking a market to focus on
- Time tracking for productivity
- Getting traction through AppSumo
- Cash up front with lifetime deals
- Raising vs bootstrapping
- How to be more productive
Recommendations
- Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport, Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Podcast: The Rest is History/Revolutions, Masters of Scale
- Indie Hacker: Tony Dinh, Arvid Kahl
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