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.
$600 MRR and 150 new users per day with SEO and marketing - Elston Baretto, Tiiny Host
Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host and is in a similar position to most indie hackers - working on his side-project alongside a full time job, but has had a career packed with learnings that we're going to talk through in this episode. Elston started out his career at JP Morgan, having reluctantly accepted a graduate job he planned to stay at for 6 months. 4 years later, he was still at the conglomerate bank, but he wasn't satisfied staying there for the rest of his career.
While at JP Morgan, Elston launched a few side-projects, some of which still make revenue today, but decided to leave to chase the startup dream. Fast forward a year and the startup dream was over, a company with 14 employees but little traction - sound familiar?
Elston went back to work full-time while he figured things out. In January 2020, he launched Tiiny.host, a super simple way to host your projects. After launching, he made $1,000 in just 3 days using lifetime deals and is now chugging away nicely as a side project.
What we covered in this episode:
- What is Tiiny Host and why did Elston start it
- How he made lifetime deals work for his launch
- Why Elston has put marketing first for Tiiny Host
- Setting goals for your indie hacker business
- How Tiiny Host got 150 sites a day being created from free SEO pages
- How has he made marketing fun
- Doing side-project marketing
- Elston's plans to go full-time
Recommendations
- Book: Traction
- Podcast: Tim Ferris Show
- Indie Hacker: Sabba Kenyejad
Follow Elston
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