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.
Rob Walling on multiple projects, why building an audience is dumb and other SaaS wisdom
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/membershipTimestamps 00:00 Intro / Sponsor 02:03 Why Rob wouldn't do SaaS again 03:43 What would an alternative reality look like for Rob 05:46 Founder retreats 07:40 Building an audience first approach is dumb for SaaS 10:29 Building a network 12:38 Portfolio of projects 15:26 Recommendations Recommendations Book: Founding Sales, Deploy Empathy Podcast: Comic Lab Indie Hacker: Ruben Gamez Follow Rob Twitter Website My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Growing an audience, making difficult decisions and launching screencasting.com - Aaron Francis
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 00:00 Intro 01:25 Aaron's Background 02:10 Learning Software Engineering through books 03:24 Audience Building 05:51 Benefits of each content medium 08:07 Making time for everything 09:27 Having a full time job 10:23 Leaving Hammerstone 12:36 Launching Screencasting.com 14:33 How has the launch gone? 15:25 Recommendations Recommendations Book - Any textbook in your field Podcast - No Plans to Merge Indie Hacker - Jordan O’Connor My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
$20k MRR with Airtable app using YouTube and SEO for growth - Andy Cloke, Data Fetcher
Today I’m joined by a returning guest, Andy Cloke, who runs Data Fetcher. Data Fetcher is an API plugin for Airtable that he’s grown to 20k MRR. In our previous episode Andy was only at around £3k MRR, so in this conversation we talk about what he’s done to grow so rapidly, including investing in new marketing channels such as YouTube.Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:58 Growing to 20k MRR 04:51 Building a machine 06:01 YouTube Strategy 09:09 Launching another product 11:38 Hiring and reinvesting into the business 13:07 Future of Data Fetcher Recommendations Book: Psychology of Money Podcast: Acquired Indie Hacker: Curtis Herbert Follow AndyTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Making $200k a year teaching Google Sheets - Andrew Kamphey
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 00:00 - Intro 02:08 - Failing to go full time 04:13 - Selling Influence Weekly 06:26 - Starting BetterSheets 09:32 - Turning Better Sheets into a full time income 11:53 - Reluctancy to become the "Google Sheets Guy" 13:37 - Recommendations Recommendations Book: Lying for Money Podcast: The Deep Life Indie Hacker: Jon Yongfook, Danny Postma, James & Danielle Follow AndrewTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Bootstrapping Ticket Tailor to £6m ARR, selling and repurchasing the company, losing motivation and more - Jonny White
Jonny White is the founder of Ticket Tailor, a platform for selling tickets online doing over £6m ARR and growing. Jonny founded Ticket Tailor in 2011, grew it to £2k MRR and then sold it to a company called TimeOut a short while later. After a few stagnant years at TimeOut, Jonny then bought the company back to make the lifestyle business he’d always wanted. After hitting all his goals, Jonny made the decision to build out a team and bootstrap the company to profitability and beyond. Now with a team of 20+ people, Jonny has a whole new set of challenges he’s dealing with, which we dig into in this episode.Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:51 - Jonny's background 02:48 - The idea for Ticket Tailor 04:39 - Getting those first few customers 05:14 - Reaching £2k MRR and considering fundraising 06:34 - Selling the company 08:00 - Buying back Ticket Tailor 09:17 - Post buy back 11:13 - Hiring a team / going beyond a lifestyle biz 12:12 - COVID 13:59 - Losing motivation post-covid 15:45 - Recommendations Recommendations Book: Donut Economics Podcast: Missing Cryptoqueen Indie Hacker: Pietro Saccamani Follow JonnyTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Carving a new life path with a newsletter about Workspaces - Ryan Gilbert, Workspaces
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 00:00 Intro 01:26 Life before Workspaces 03:37 Did you have any side projects before workspaces? 04:47 Growth of the Workspaces newsletter 06:40 How long did each edition take? 07:45 The best workspaces 08:25 Monetizing the newsletter 10:22 Selling the newsletter 13:08 Imposter syndrome 13:57 Recommendations Recommendations Book - The Creative Act by Rick Rubin Podcast - Creator Science Indie Hacker - Brett Williams
Taking on Bit.ly bootstrapped - Tim Leland, T.LY
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. 00:00 Intro 05:15 Building a portfolio of extensions 07:45 Starting T.LY 10:06 Being the low price option 11:49 Getting users for T.LY 12:51 Quitting his job 15:13 Reccos Recommendations Book - Atomic Habits Podcast - My First Million Indie Hacker - Rob Walling
Working towards life-changing outcomes as an indie hacker - Colleen Schnettler, HelloQuery
In this episode I’m joined by Colleen Schnettler, which a lot of you would have heard from through her Software Social podcast she co-hosts with Michele Hansen. Colleen has been on quite the journey over the past few years, going from years of contracting to launching her first product, Simple File Upload, then getting a large contracting gig with Hammerstone, landing a separate full-time job to then quit 3 weeks later to rejoin that Hammerstone as a co-founder.What we covered: 00:00 Intro 02:03 Why start the Software Social podcast? 02:59 Why start building products 04:04 Colleen's first product: Simple File Upload 05:07 Why they stopped the podcast 06:37 Joining Hammerstone 08:50 Being a solo founder 10:16 Hello Query 11:47 Closing down a successful product 13:50 Reccos Reccomendations Book: The Mom Test Podcast: Boostrapped Web Indie Hacker: Corey Haines Follow ColleenTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Gamifying products, shipping quickly and knowing when to quit - Marc Louvion
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 00:00 Intro 01:32 Marc's indie hacker journey 03:07 Moving to Bali 03:39 Starting a glove business 05:52 Gamification 07:41 Challenges with gamification 08:29 Knowing when to quit a product 10:32 Portfolio of projects vs single focus 11:46 Marc's day to day 12:53 Building an AI product 14:00 Creative launch videos 15:14 Reccos Recommendations Book: Why We Sleep Podcast: Indie Hackers Indie Hacker: Danny Postma Follow Marc Twitter Explore Marc's products My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise
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. Jason's tweet which inspired this conversation Mike's response Dom's response Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:56 Indie hacker identity crisis 03:42 How indie hacking has changed 06:32 Why the indie label can be a limiter 08:20 Accepting slow growth instead of fixing it 10:33 Should we set bigger goals? 12:10 We still love the indie hacker community 13:50 Recommendations Recommendations Book - Sprint Podcast - This Indie Life Indie Hacker - Ramen Club Follow Dom Twitter Hire him as a mentor Personal site My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
How to find and validate your ideas - Bram Kanstein, Startup Stash / No Code MVP
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 00:00 Intro 03:18 Startup Stash 05:56 No Code MVP 09:47 Finding ideas 12:22 Idea validation 15:00 Recommendations Recommendations Book - Untethered Soul by Michael Singer Podcast(s) - Joe Rogan, HIBT, MFM Indie Hacker - Danny Postma Follow BramTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Growing Frontend Mentor to 500k users and $30k MRR - Matt Studdert
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: 00:00 Intro 02:16 Playing Poker full time 02:58 Becoming a personal trainer 04:24 Learning to code with General Assembly 06:33 Front End Mentor 08:33 Building a scrappy MVP 11:29 Growth for Front End Mentor 15:03 Reccos Recommendations Book - badass make users awesome Podcast - Acquired Indie Hacker - Arvid Kahl, Valentin Wallyn Follow MattTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Jordan O'Connor on running a $30k MRR SaaS and doing SEO consulting on the side
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 00:00 Intro 03:29 Jordan being awful with money 04:30 Jordan's indie hacking journey 06:10 Launching and failing with different products 07:06 Choosing SaaS 08:31 Starting closet tools 11:38 Pricing for Closet Tools 12:35 Reverse stair stepping with Rank to Sell (consulting) 16:08 Reccos Recommendations Book - Deep Work Podcast - Deep Questions by Cal Newport Indie Hacker - Pat Walls Follow Jordan Twitter Personal website My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Growing a $2m p/y indie business - Josh Ho, Referral Rock
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.Timestamps00:00 - Intro01:24 - Josh's background02:11 - Lessons from a failed startup04:16 - Failed startup to new long term bet05:41 - The idea for Referral Rock06:59 - Pricing a B2C product08:33 - Marketing advice for indie hackers12:24 - Challenges along the way14:01 - Raising15:41 - RecommendationsRecommendations Book - Extreme Entrepreneurship Podcast - Don't Say Content Indie Hacker - Monica Lent Follow Josh Twitter Josh's Substack My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.
Building a 6-figure creator business - Jay Clouse, Creator Science
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 01:55 The Creative Elements podcast (now Creator Science) 04:45 How to have a point of differentiation 06:11 Building a creator business 08:23 Making $40k in one month 11:03 Multiple projects and revenue streams 13:10 How Jay spends his time 14:02 How to start out as a creator 15:19 Recommendations Recommendations Book - How to Win Friends and Influence People Podcast - Bandsplain Indie hacker / entrepreneur - Justin Moore Follow JayTwitterMy links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.