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.
Candle dealer builds $5k MRR software to solve own problem - Dianna Allen & Jeremy Blalock, Inventora
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.
What we covered in this episode:
- How TERRA is going
- Handmade business vs SaaS business. Which is better?
- Solving her own problem with TERRA to build Inventora
- Spreadsheet to SaaS
- Asking Jeremy (Dianna’s partner) to build the product
- Growing without paying for ads
- Leveraging existing relationships
- Choosing to raise a small funding round
- Why raise money if you’re an indie hacker?
- Spending $25,000 on a domain
- Tactics for growing to $5k MRR
- Hiring a videographer to make a documentary
Recommendations
- Books: The Innovation Stack, The Gardeners Almanack
- Podcasts: Acquired, The Product Boss
- Indie Hackers: Elon Musk, Jon Yongfook
Follow Dianna & Jeremy
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👉 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.