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.
Stair stepping to millions in SaaS revenue - Craig Hewitt, Castos
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:
- Craig's background in sales
- Launching a podcasting productized service in 2014
- Stair stepping to SaaS
- Acquiring Seriously Simple Podcasting
- Product positioning
- Growth and marketing for Castos
- His approach to podcasting
- Bootstrapping vs raising
- Founder Insights newsletter
Recommendations
- Book: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan
- Podcast: Startups for the Rest of Us
- Indie Hacker: Moritz Dausinger
Follow Craig
My links
- Indie Bites Twitter
- Indie Bites YouTube
- Join the membership
- Personal Website
- Buy A Wallet
- 2 Hour Podcast Course
- PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
- This Indie Life Podcast
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools