Indie Bites
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. Episodes every Tuesday.
Episodes
Andrew Gazdecki on the best way to sell your indie SaaS business
Andrew Gazdecki is the founder of Acquire, previously known as MicroAcquire, the largest startup acquisition marketplace. I’ve spoken to many indie hackers about selling their businesses, many of whom have done so using Andrew’s platform. Before starting the Acquire, Andrew spent 8 years bootstrapping Bizness Apps to $10m ARR before being acquired by a private equity firm. You might also
Why you should build a sweaty startup instead of an indie SaaS - Flo Schirmer
Today I’m talking with Flo Schirmer about "sweaty startups", a term for old-fashioned, low-risk businesses that are often service based and unsexy. I’m talking window cleaning, car washing, self-storage, house moving and more. We’re going to discuss if you can do this as a side hustle, if you should do this over a regular software business, and what you need to do to get started with some
How Tally grew to $150k MRR in 5 years - Marie Martens
Marie Martens is the co-founder of Tally, a form builder she started with her partner Filip, now used by half a million people and are over $150k MRR. Marie was on the pod 3 years ago when they’d scaled to 16,000 users and $8k MRR in 1 year. In that episode we discussed the origin story, getting their first 100 users and how they’d grown so quickly. Today, we’re going to be finding out ho
Why the Marketoonist is the dream indie business - Tom Fishburne
Tom Fishburne is the founder of Marketoonist, a bootstrapped marketing cartoon business he started in 2010. He started drawing and sharing cartoons in 2002, and it took him 8 years to make the leap, despite having a successful career in marketing. 15 years later, Tom is still going strong, with the business making money from cartoon licensing, speaking gigs, brand deals, his book and more
Why Jack Ellis acquired Fathom Analytics from his co-founder
Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, a simple, privacy focused analytics tool launched in 2019. I last spoke to Jack on the podcast in 2021, where he talked about the inception and growth of Fathom, taking on a massive incumbent and why Jack loves working with a co-founder. In December 2024, Jack acquired his co-founder’s share in the business, making him the sole owner (i th
Typeshare's $34k MRR bootstrapped journey - Sam Shore
Sam Shore is the co-founder of Typeshare, a writing platform made to create and publish text across the internet. Typeshare has made over $1m in revenue since it was started in 2021, with over 80,000 user, currently $34k MRR I’m speaking to Sam to find out how he started Typeshare as the first of 12 startups he was planning to build, and what made this stick.00:00 Intro01:10 Sam's entrepr
How Justin Duke is building Buttondown into the perfect bootstrapped business
Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email tool he launched in 2017. Justin was last on the podcast 2 years ago when he’d hit $15k MRR and just left his role at Stripe to focus on Buttondown. I was struck by Justin’s well thought through approach to building. He makes calculated risks and shares a lot of his learnings on his blog, Applied Cartography (which is an essential r
How to sell your indie business - Josh Peleg
Today I’m not actually joined by an indie hacker, but by someone who can help a lot of indies out there. Josh Peleg is the Head of Biz Dev and Mergers and Acquisitions at BlueThrone. Essentially, he knows all about how to sell a business from the buyer's side.In this episode we’re going to learn from Josh exactly what you need to know about selling your indie product. How you find an acqu
Arvid Kahl on building a profitable SaaS (Podscan), calm funding and juggling a media business
Arvid Kahl is returning to the podcast for the third time. In 2019, he’d just sold Feedback Panda for a life changing amount of money and then wrote the book Zero to Sold. In 2023, he was in full-on creator mode with The Bootstrapped Founder and had just released The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now, he’s still producing the content but is also spending time on his SaaS Podscan, which is an ext
High Signal founder on the state of indie hacking and building in public in 2025 - Pete Codes
Recently I’ve been reviewing my catalogue of previous guests and have been intrigued to see where they are now, so expect to see a few more returning guests over the next few weeks.Today is a chap who was last on the podcast 3 years ago, and is still ever present in the indie community. Pete Codes is writes the High Signal newsletter, sharing all the best indie hacking news every week. He
How Podsqueeze grew to $16k MRR in 18 months - Tiago Ferreira
Tiago Ferreira is the co-founder of Podsqueeze, an AI podcast tool that helps automate your podcast content. The tool, that helps you create show notes, newsletters, social posts and more, is currently doing $16k MRR and growing. You might also know Tiago from his podcast Wannabe Entrepreneur, where he’s interviewed impressive founders including Pieter Levels.Timestamps00:00 - Intro120 -
How Buy Me A Coffee grew to millions of users - Jijo Sunny
Today I’m joined by Jijo Sunny, who is the co-founder of Buy Me A Coffee, one of the most popular donation and membership platforms on the internet. They’ve processed 10’s of millions for creators and have built a 26 strong team. Since founding Buy Me A Coffee, Jijo has dabbled in all sorts of projects, including a stint in YC with a podcasting app. Now though, Jijo is back building a new
How focusing on customer happiness led to success for KnowledgeOwl - Marybeth Alexander
Marybeth Alexander is the founder and Chief Executive Owl of KnowledgeOwl, a bootstrapped knowledge base software founded in 2015. Started as an idea within SurveyGizmo, where Marybeth was working at the time, the company has since flourished into a small, profitable, sustainable business ultimately being built to improve the lives of the founders, employees and customers. In this episode
Ranking #1 in Google with Lorem Ipsum and making a career out of scientific SEO - Kyle Roof
Kyle Roof is the co-founder of High Voltage SEO, PageOptimizer Pro and Internet Marketing Gold. An agency, software and course business respectively which all focus on mastering SEO. I’ve spoken at length on the podcast before about how SEO can be such an effective tool for indie hackers to use, so Kyle is the perfect guest to talk to today.Timestamps00:00 Intro02:58 How Kyle learned SEO0
Finding success with a QR code app after selling his previous indie business - Ramy Khuffash
Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Hovercode, a QR code generator he’s working on full time. Previously, Ramy founded Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers that he sold last November.Timestamps00:00 Intro00:56 Email Octopus Sponsor02:30 Page Flows Acquisition05:03 What did Ramy buy after he sold his company05:56 Starting Hovercode08:05 Finding new business ideas09
From Tweet Hunter's 8 figure exit, to starting all over again - Tibo Louis-Lucas
Tibo Louis-Lucas is a serial founder, most well known for starting Tweet Hunter and Taplio in 2021, before selling the company in 2022 for 8 figures. Since then, Tibo has gone on to acquire an AI video creation tool, Typeframes, which he spun Revid.ai recently. He actually announced after recording this that he has left Tweethunter and is back to focusing on his early stage products, whic
Building a $200k MRR bootstrapped maid software for a price sensitive niche - Amar Ghose, ZenMaid
Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid, a Maid Service software that has just hit $200k MRR. Amar is a seasoned bootstrapped entrepreneur, having started ZenMaid back in 2013. Amar’s story shows the power of sticking with something through the hard times, and having an unsexy niche (aka not selling to other indie hackers) can lead to a phenomenal indie business.Timestamps00:00 Intro02:53 Sc
Building WP Minute, a 5-figure side project without a huge audience - Matt Medeiros, WP Minute
Matt Medeiros is the founder of WP Minute, a weekly podcast highlighting WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. He’s a podcasting expert, having previously worked as Director of Podcasting success at Castos and now hosts & produces Breakdown, a podcast by Gravity forms. This episode talks about how you can make a sustainable 5-figure side project, with a niche audience while working a
Building a $700k ARR newsletter - Manu Cinca, Stacked Marketer
Manu Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter he bootstrapped to $700k. In 2023, he acquired 2 newsletters to bring the subscriber count to 100k and raised a small 250k funding round to help boost growth.
Bootstrapping the 100DaysOfNoCode learning platform - Max Haining
Max Haining is the founder of 100DaysofNoCode and 100DaysofAI, which are bootcamps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills. Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100DaysofNoCode as a challenge for himself to learn NoCode tools during covid, but as more people joined in, he realised he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform which he’s now worki
Bouncing back from losing 70% revenue - Max Serrano, IGotAnOffer
Max Serrano is the founder of IGotAnOffer, a bootstrapped coaching platform focused on helping people get jobs and progress their career. Initially starting out in consulting, Max started IGotAnOffer on the side, creating digital products to help people land consulting jobs, but pivoted to coaching after they lost 70% of their revenue in the tech hiring freeze, having to lay off the major
Building and monetizing an audience as a software engineer - Randall Kanna Franson
Today I’m joined by Randall Kanna Franson. Randall is a senior software engineer who has written 3 books, including one published by O’Reilly and a self published one which made over $70k. She also created a course called Hack the Tech interview which made $20k in the first 24 hours and $50k in the first month. All of this has been through Randall’s efforts to share her learnings from alm
Can you really scale a No Code SaaS? - Kieran Ball, NoCodeLife
Kieran Ball is the founder of NoCodeLife, a selection of case studies of those making successful businesses using NoCode. Kieran also has courses on how to become a NoCode SaaS founder, specifically using the Bubble platform. I wanted to get Kieran on the pod to discuss and challenge the NoCode movement and if you can actually create a scalable product using the tools available, or if NoC
B2C vs B2B SaaS as an indie hacker - Val Sopi, Blogstatic
Today I’m joined by Val Sopi, the founder of Blogstatic, a lightweight blogging platform built to take on the likes of Ghost. Currently Val is sitting around $1k a month, but with a low-priced annual plans approach, he’s relying on new sign ups and plan upgrades instead of recurring subscriptions. So he’s at a crossroads of needing to pour fuel on the fire to grow his low-cost blogging pl
How VEED bootstrapped to $7m ARR - Sabba Keynejad, VEED.io (2020)
Today I'm revisiting one of my favourite episodes, from 2020, with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder and CEO of VEED.io, an online video editing platform. When I interviewed Sabba, VEED were at around $2m ARR, fully bootstrapped. Since this interview, they’ve gone on to bootstrap to about $7m ARR before raising a whopping $35m series A from Sequoia. And when I first met Sabba, years before this
Lemon Squeezy CTO on why he still makes side projects - Gilbert Pellegrom
Gilbert Pellegrom, is co-founder and CTO of Lemon Squeezy, a platform for selling software and digital products online. Previously Gilbert created the Nivo Slider all in 2010, which grew to millions of users before selling it. He then went on to work with Orman Clark at ThemeZilla and Dunked, who he’s teamed up with again to build Lemon Squeezy. What’s interesting about Gilbert is that de
Scaling and exiting a $65k MRR with meal planning app - Jeffrey Bunn, Mealime & Clearful
Today I’m joined by Jeffrey Bunn, who is the co-founder of Clearful, a digital journal app he built with his wife, Maria. Previously they co-founded Mealime, a meal planning app which grew to a whopping $65k MRR before they exited in 2018. In this episode we cover the story of founding both apps, how they utilised the app stores for growth and why they started a B2C app in a crowded marke
The slow and steady path to growth - Michael Christofides
Today I’m joined by Michael Christofides, who is the founder of PgMustard, a product which helps people speed up Postgres queries. Michael started out working for a Devtools company as a product manager and went on to run customer success at London based unicorn, GoCardless. Now, Michael might not be as well known and successful as other popular indie hackers, but he works on his own term
Arvid Kahl on side projects, hobbies and making money as a founder
Arvid Kahl runs The Bootstrapped Founder, a podcast, newsletter and educational resource to help founders grow successful bootstrapped businesses. He’s also written two books, Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entreprenuer. Arvid is a returning guest, having previously been on the show almost 3 years ago, to talk about his exit from FeedbackPanda, which he grew to $55k MRR with his partner, D
Quitting his job and taking a £20k loan to go full time indie - Harvey Carpenter, Growform
Harvey Carpenter is the founder of Growform, a form builder which is now around 7K MRR. It's a mixture of enterprise and some other clients, and he's tackling a product in a market that is extremely competitive and crowded, but he's trying to carve out his own little slice of that market.Timestamps00:00 Intro01:21 Harvey's life before Growform01:35 Side projects as a 17 yr old04:10 Gettin
How to get to ramen profitability - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club
Today is a special episode, because it marks 100 episodes of Indie Bites. And to mark the occasion, I’m bringing back my guest from episode 1, Charlie Ward, founder of Ramen Club to talk about how he’s grown to community into the core of the London indie scene while scaling to £7k MRR in the process. Charlie has also been a long time supporter of the show, having sponsored well over 30 ep
Bootstrapping EmailOctopus to $3m+ ARR - Jonathan Bull & Tom Evans
Today I’m joined by Tom Evans and Jonathan Bull from EmailOctopus, an email platform who have bootstrapped to over $3m ARR since they were founded in 2014. They’ve been battling in a crowded and competitive market, with some huge funded companies to contend with, but they’ve made it work in an indie way. In this episode we talk about how they lost 99% of their users overnight, why they’ve
Building a financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson
In this episode I have a returning guest, someone who is a keystone of the bootstrapping community, it’s Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor, MegaMaker and more. Today we have an unstructured but very useful chat about building a financial engine for your business. This is a topic that has come up countless times in my indie journey and I think it’s something that a lot of indie busi
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
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 screen
$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.Timestamps00:00 Intro01:58 Growing to 20k MRR04:51 Bui
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
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,
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 n
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 ha
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
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 pr
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 su
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.Timestamps00:00 Intro03:18 Startup Stash05:56 No Code MVP09:47 Findin
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 Intro02:16 Pla
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 ->Timestam
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 background
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 thi
Building a $15k MRR side project while working at Stripe - Justin Duke, Buttondown
Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email newsletter tool without all the bloat. In December 2022 Buttondown was around $15k MRR. He also runs Spoonbill, which is a way to stay updated on what people change on their social profiles. At the time of recording this Justin was an engineering manager at Stripe so you’ll hear references to that, but he’s since left to go all in o
Breaking Convention: The Radical Thinking of Jack McDade and Statamic
Jack McDade is the creator of Statamic, a content management system for Laravel. What I love about Jack is how he approaches all of his projects, including Statamic, to just be different. There is so much cookie cutter content out there and everything just ends up looking the same - but not if Jack has anything to do with it. Just take a look at his personal website, his Radical Design co
From $0 to $10k MRR in 2 years - Elston Baretto, Tiiny Host (Revisited)
Elston Baretto was last on the pod in March 2021, when he’d just grown his tool, Tiiny.host, to $600 MRR and we recorded as part of my mission to share stories of unknown indie hackers with potential. Fast forward 2 years and Tiiny Host has grown to $10k MRR and Elston has just quit his job to become a full time indie hacker.👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co.Topics covered:Hitting $1
Making $12k p/m with Wordpress plugins - Patrick Posner
Patrick Posner is the creator of a portfolio of Wordpress plugins which have been downloaded almost a million times collectively making him $12k p/m. Patrick went full time indie in 2020 and since then has both grown quickly and scaled back operations to build the best sort of life for him. I love these types of stories of relatively unknown indie hackers who are creating the dream life f
From $50m VC-backed to $20k MRR notes app - Alex MacCaw, Reflect (prev. Clearbit)
Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a note taking app which he’s grown to $20k MRR with a team of 4. Previously, he was the co-founder of Clearbit, a VC-backed company that scaled to $50m in revenue. After stepping down as CEO of Clearbit, he decided to focus on doing the stuff he enjoys. So he’s sailing around the world building an app that gets him excited every day.👉 My side project
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
Daniel Fayle: from commercial banker to making millions in software
Today I’m joined by Dan Fayle, who is the co-founder of Chekkit, a company that’s he bootstrapped to almost $2.5m ARR and 20 employees. There’s a few interesting things about Dan’s story I know you’re going to like. This is his first company and he quit his job to go all-in with 3 co-founders, he got his early customers through, and I’m not kidding, door to door sales and finally he’s not
How Ahrefs Built A Best-In-Class SEO Strategy - Tim Soulo, Ahrefs
Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs, one of the biggest and best SEO tools on the internet. Ahrefs are one of the clear success stories as a bootstrapped company, growing to be a an 8 figure brand over the past decade. Things really took off when Tim took over marketing for the company back in 2015, first focusing on growing the blog, before experimenting with different marketing channel to br
Bootstrapping a leather supply business to $50k in sales - Jared Maddern, Beamhouse Leather
Today I’m joined by Jared Maddern, the founder of Beamhouse Leather, a leather supply business he’s grown to £45k in sales in the past 2 years. Some of you might know I run a handmade leather wallet business on the side, called Whitstable Craft Co, and so this is a little look into the other part of my life.Although Jared doesn’t run an indie SaaS, I wanted to bring slightly different per
How to build a newsletter business - Louis Nicholls, SparkLoop
Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, a product that helps newsletter operators grow through referral partnerships. Indie hackers might know Louis from his Sales for Founders course which he ran a few years ago, as well as his many other projects.What we covered in this episode:How Sparkloop StartedHow Louis met his cofounder ManuelGoing Niche vs BroadPursuing a growing marketWha
Near death VC experience to $25k p/m bootstrapped - Kyle Gawley, Gravity
Kyle Gawley is the founder of Gravity, which he’s bootstrapped to over $25k p/m. In 2012, he scaled a vc-backed company, called Get Invited, to $5m in sales, before a near-death experience made him rethink how he lived his life. Now, Kyle is travelling the world building his bootstrapped SaaS. Let’s find out how he did it.Join the Indie Bites membership 👈What we covered in this episodeSta
Bootstrapping to $3.5m ARR from YouTuber to Founder - Sam King, Flick
Sam King is the founder of Flick, a tool for managing and growing your social media, doing over $3.5m ARR fully bootstrapped. Sam has taken a unique path into bootstrapping, first being a YouTuber, then running an agency before flipping it into a SaaS with Flick. There is an hour long extended version of this show available on the Indie Bites membership, head to indiebites.com/membership
A masterclass in customer research as a founder - Michele Hansen, Deploy Empathy
Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio, a SaaS business that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses, co-host of the fantastic podcast Software Social and author of the book Deploy Empathy, which is all about how to do great customer interviews. We cover a lot of ground in this short episode, including how to write a book, building in public and mental health as a founder
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.Join the membership for extended conversa
Building a community of generalists on a remote island - Milly Tamati, Generalist World
Milly Tamati is not your usual founder. She lives on an remote island off Scotland with a population of just 170 people, previously co-owned a hostel in Thailand, co-founded a wine-tour in Australia and founded an illustration-agency in the UK. Now she’s working on a community called generalist.world, where’s she’s helping generalists like us indie hackers, find like minded individuals an
Bootstrapping Helpkit to $4.5k MRR - Dominik Sobe, Helpkit
Today I’m joined by Dominik Sobe, the founder of Helpkit, a product he started last year that turns Notion pages into a professional help center, doing $4.5k MRR. In this episode we talk about Dom’s many failed projects, how he finally found something that worked with Helpkit and how he went from wanting to be a management consultant to being an indie hacker.What we covered in this episod
Solo founder grows reverse job board to $100k a year - Joe Masilotti, RailsDevs
Joe Masilotti is the founder of RailsDevs a reverse job board for Ruby on Rails developers, which is over $4k MRR and on for $100k revenue. Joe also runs the monthly Hotwire Dev newsletter, which has over 2,000 subs. And then late last year, Joe sold his side-project Mugshot Bot, which he took from idea to sale in just 14 months.What we covered on this episode:How and why Joe sold Mugshot
Focusing on one product in a strong market (for 15 years) - Geoff Roberts, Outseta
Geoff Roberts is the co-founder of Outseta, a bootstrapped all-in-one platform to help manage and grow your recurring revenue business. Before Outseta, Geoff was Head of Marketing for Buildium, a product that went through the phases of bootstrapping, raising and exiting, that was started by current co-founder Dimitris.What we covered in this episode:Taking a big 15 year bet on your busine
Ending the VC dream and pivoting to an indie company - David Kofoed Wind, Eduflow
David Kofoed Wind is the co-founder and CEO of Eduflow an education platform started in 2015 as Peergrade, which was a peer to peer feedback tool. David is the definition of technical, having studied for a degree in applied math and computer science, then a Ph.D in machine learning. This is where the idea for Peergrade was born, as he started teach a course in data science and solved his
How to build in public - Kevon Cheung, Public Lab
If you’re wanting to learn about building in public, Kevon Cheung is your guy. After not getting the fulfilment he desired from the VC funded startup dream, Kevon struck out on his own in 2020 to become an indie hacker. Since then he’s launched the Build in Public Mastery course, started a newsletter called Public Lab, wrote the Definitive Guide to Building in Public and then to top this
How to build a brand for your indie product - Marie Ng, Llama Life
Marie Ng is the founder of Llama Life, a to-do-list app that helps you focus. As someone who struggles with focus myself, Marie’s app looked to be the perfect thing. Having taught herself how to code 2 years ago, after a career in branding, Marie did what everyone does when they learn to code, build a to do list app. But with her branding background and new quirky angle on a productivity
Why you need a single focus (and ditch your portfolio of projects) - Chris Frantz, Loops
Chris Frantz is the co-founder of Loops, YC backed email tool for startups. Chris is one of those people who just knows how to run a SaaS business, having founded and sold Snazzy AI, acquired by Unbounce last year. Chris has been living rent free in my brain after a conversation we had a few weeks ago about my multiple projects. A lot of you are going to have multiple projects too, and wo
Growing Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling to Github - Grey Baker, Dependabot
Grey Baker is the co-founder of Dependabot, which is a bot that makes it easy for developers to keep the third party dependencies up to date, which grew to $14k MRR before being acquired by Github in 2019. Grey’s story is a long an interesting one, so there is an extended version of this podcast available on the indie feast membership. But the best bits are here about he started out at Mc
r/SaaS moderator making $6k MRR with his own SaaS - CH Daniel, Simple.ink
Ch Daniel is the co-founder of Legit Check, an app that authenticates luxury items, that grew to $6k MRR in just a few weeks. He’s also building simple.ink, which is a simple way to make a website from Notion, it got #1 product of the day and got 1,300 users in the first month. He’s also got his finger in many SaaS pies, running the r/SaaS subreddit where he arranges AMAs and facilitates
Multiple successful exits to making lemonade - JR Farr, Lemon Squeezy
JR Farr is the co-founder of Make Lemonade, a product studio behind Lemon Squeezy (a platform to sell digital products), Dunked (to showcase your portfolio) and Iconic (a set of cracking looking apps). But this isn’t JR’s first foray into entrepreneurship. Back in 2008 he sold his first startup, College Connecting, before starting and selling another, MOJO marketplace back in 2012. From h
Behind the success of Trends.vc - Dru Riley, Trends
Dru Riley is the founder of Trends.vc which at its core helps people discover new ideas and markets through expertly researched reports. Trends is a bootstrapped company that makes money through it’s Trends Pro reports and community.In 2017, Dru took on a mini-retirement, sold a second home and set out with 3-5 years of savings to strike out on his own. After launching various newsletters
Bootstrapped founder running 3 profitable businesses - Monica Lent, Affilimate
Monica Lent is a founder running 3 profitable indie businesses after leaving her full time job 2 years ago. She runs Affilimate, a SaaS product which allows you to manage and track affiliate commissions, the Blogging for Devs newsletter and paid community for developers looking to grow an audience and finally, Not a Nomad, a travel blog that accounted for almost 50% of Monica’s revenue la
Growing ScrapingBee to $1m ARR - Pierre De Wulf, ScrapingBee
Pierre De Wulf is the co-founder of ScrapingBee a web scraping API that grew to $1M ARR in 2 years. Before starting ScrapingBee, Pierre and his co-founder Kevin had quit their jobs to follow the indie dream. 9 months later, their product PricingBot couldn’t generate the traction they were hoping for so they sold the business and pivoted to ScrapingBee.What we covered in this episode:Pierr
Bootstrapping Testimonial to $13k MRR after many failed products - Damon Chen, Testimonial
Damon Chen, who is the founder of Testimonial, a product that collects video testimonials that he launched back in December 2020, and has grown it to $13k MRR since then. Damon quit his stable job of 8 years at Cisco to pursue his dream of building a better life for himself as an indie hacker. This didn’t come easily for Damon, as he launched several products which made 0 revenue before h
Building a mentorship platform to $1m GMV - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise
Dominic Monn is the founder of MentorCruise, a marketplace that connect mentors and mentees in Tech, which is currently doing $15k in monthly revenue and processed over $1m through the platform. Previously, Domm was a Machine Learning engineer at Doist, a job that he left in Feb '22 to pursue MentorCruise full time.What we covered in this episode:Why Dom left his full-time job at DoistHow
Bootstrapping vs venture capital & lessons from a veteran - Spencer Fry, Podia
Today I’m joined by Spencer Fry, founder of Podia, a platform helping creators make a living online through selling courses, digital downloads, webinars and more. 7 years in, they have a 35 person team and have an awesome product for creators. But this isn’t Spencer’s first rodeo, bootstrapping and exiting 3 businesses between 2003 and 2014, notably Carbonmade and TypeFrag. What’s interes
Why your product needs marketing - Dagobert Renouf, Logology
Dagobert Renouf is the founder of Logoloy, a logo and brand design service that he started with his wife, doing around $3k in monthly revenue. This is an awesome story. Dago started building Logoloy in September 2018, then completely failed the launch after building for almost 2 years. It wasn't until May 21 that Dago realised he actually needed to find a marketing channel that worked for
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