Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Indie Bites
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How Buy Me A Coffee grew to millions of users - Jijo Sunny | 23 Aug 2024 | 00:16:41 | |
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 product, Voicenotes, a voice driven AI note taking app. 👉 Listen to the full 1 hour conversation with Jijo here: indiebites.com/membership Timestamps
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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 focusing on customer happiness led to success for KnowledgeOwl - Marybeth Alexander | 09 Aug 2024 | 00:16:10 | |
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 we talk about how Marybeth bought the company from her previous employers, how they grew through reviews and why more indie hackers should put customer happiness front and centre. Timestamps
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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 and monetizing an audience as a software engineer - Randall Kanna Franson | 24 Jan 2024 | 00:16:58 | |
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 almost a decade being a software engineer and growing her twitter audience to over 50,000 followers. She’s also dabbled in SaaS products, notably launching and growing CodeTutor which she sold after the birth of her first child. Timestamps
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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. | |||
| Lessons learned bootstrapping and selling a $55k p/m SaaS - Arvid Kahl, TheBootstrappedFounder | 23 Feb 2021 | 00:15:45 | |
Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company. In over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business. Get the full, 60 minute conversation with Arvid here with the Indie Feast membership. What we covered in this episode:
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It blew my mind when Julian told me about the growth their client MentorCruise had from the SEO content, resulting in 107% increase in MRR, 100% increase in monthly trials and a 114% increase SEO traffic. My word, wouldn't you want those kind of results for your indie business. Go and check out what Embarque are offering at Embarque.io and get $100 off your first package with the code 'INDIEBITES'. | |||
| Making $15k in 24 hours selling a book on Gumroad - Philip Kiely, Gumroad | 23 Jan 2021 | 00:15:30 | |
Today we're joined by Philip Kiely, who is currently Head of Marketing at Gumroad. Philip also launched "Writing for Software Developers" last May, making $20,000 in sales in its first week without any pre-existing audience. Since then, Philip has been on a mission to help as many software developers as possible realize that they possess the skills they need to become great writers. What we covered in this episode:
Follow Philip Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week! ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. Interested in ad-free episodes an exclusive content? Sign up to the Indie Feast membership. | |||
| Making over $5k/month from a portfolio of side projects - Dan Rowden, ilo | 15 Jan 2021 | 00:15:36 | |
Dan, like many other indie hackers, runs a bunch of projects alongside a full-time job which all compound to him making over $5k a month. In 2012 he started Magpile, a free online resource about magazines, which was followed by Subsail, a platform to help indie publishers sell magazine subscriptions. Earlier this year Dan started using the publishing platform Ghost, which he then started to build a suite of products around, now including:
Dan also launched ilo, a better analytics platform for Twitter a few months ago, which has earned over $6k in revenue since launch.
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Follow Dan Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week! ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. Interested in ad-free episodes an exclusive content? Sign up to the Indie Feast membership. | |||
| Turning $100 into $52,000 selling handmade candles DTC - Dianna Allen, TERRA | 11 Jan 2021 | 00:15:25 | |
Dianna Allen is the founder of TERRA, a DTC candle brand, where she designs and hand pours a variety of candles. In October 2020, Dianna left her life as a freelancer behind to put her efforts into TERRA full-time, which as we all know, is a huge leap to make. What we covered:
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Follow Dianna Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week! ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| How Pat Walls made $20k in 2 weeks from his SEO course - Pat Walls, Starter Story | 16 Dec 2020 | 00:15:32 | |
Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. They interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started their business and how they grew it, including revenue figures for every business they interview. But in this episode, we’re going to be discussing the new SEO course that Pat launched this week, making over $20k in pre-sales. What we covered
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Follow Pat Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| Choosing freedom over money - Rob Hope, One Page Love + Yo! | 08 Dec 2020 | 00:15:39 | |
Today I’m joined by Rob Hope, who is a South African designer, developer and the host of one of my favorite podcasts out there for entrepreneurs Yo!. He's also the founder of One Page Love, Email Love, and has recently released an ebook with a hundred landing page tips. It's safe to say Rob knows his stuff. When it comes to building landing pages, having started One Page Love back in 2008. What we discussed in this episode:
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Follow Rob Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| Why indie hackers should be podcasting - Mark Asquith, Rebel Base Media | 01 Dec 2020 | 00:15:28 | |
Mark Asquith (aka That British Podcast Guy) is the CEO of Rebel Base Media, the U.K. podcast tech company that makes Captivate.fm and so much more. What we discussed in this episode:
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Follow Mark Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for a 30 day free trial. | |||
| Making a full-time income working just one day per week - Ramy Khuffash, Page Flows | 18 Nov 2020 | 00:15:23 | |
Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers. Ramy started Page Flows after building a UI newsletter to thousands of subscribers, trying to improve his own skills as a developer who cares about design. Ramy is now a full-time indie hacker, with Page Flows making enough revenue to sustain him, alongside a few other side projects. What we discussed in this episode:
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Follow Ramy Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| Paying off $250k in debt by starting a company making $1.5m ARR - Nick Fogle, Wavve | 31 Oct 2020 | 00:15:46 | |
Nick Fogle is the co-founder of Wavve and ChurnKey, but there is a lot more to Nick than just that. Wavve is an audio to video platform which has now hit $1.5m in ARR, but Nick has only left his full time job 3 years after starting the company and 9 months after it had eclipsed his salary. Why? Well, Nick had $250,000 student loans to pay off. What we covered in this episode:
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| Building the one of the most popular Slack apps of all time - Wilhelm Klopp, Simple Poll | 24 Oct 2020 | 00:15:29 | |
Wilhelm Klopp is the founder of Simple Poll, a super simple (but powerful) poll Slack app that has over 600k active users. Wil now works on Simple Poll full time having left his job at GitHub in September 2019 (1 year ago 🎉). What we discussed in this episode:
Quick fire answers
Follow Wil Follow Me Thanks to Mugshot Bot for sponsoring Indie Bites.
Mugshot Bot is a tool that I use personally and made by another indie hacker, Joe Masilotti. To level up your link previews, go to mugshotbot.com/indiebites, link in the show notes, to create an image for your site, completely free. | |||
| Can you really scale a No Code SaaS? - Kieran Ball, NoCodeLife | 11 Jan 2024 | 00:16:45 | |
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 NoCode serves a different purpose. Timestamps
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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 SaaS with just one hour every day - Mubashar Iqbal (Mubs) | 19 Oct 2020 | 00:15:10 | |
Mubashar 'Mubs' Iqbal is a prolific maker who has started over 90 projects. Currently Mubs is building Founderpath with Nathan Latka, and on One Hour SaaS where he spends one hour every day working on SaaS businesses. In this episode we talked about:
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Follow Mubs Follow Me Thanks to Mugshot Bot for sponsoring Indie Bites.
Mugshot Bot is a tool that I use personally and made by another indie hacker, Joe Masilotti. To level up your link previews, go to mugshotbot.com/indiebites, link in the show notes, to create an image for your site, completely free. | |||
| What it takes to build a community - Rosie Sherry, Indie Hackers | 15 Oct 2020 | 00:15:22 | |
Rosie Sherry is a community builder, indie hacker and founder. She currently runs the Indie Hackers community and also a weekly newsletter where she talks about building communities. Previously, Rosie founded Ministry of Testing. In this episode we talked about:
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Follow Rosie Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| Leaving a full-time head of growth role to be a full-time indie hacker - Corey Haines, Swipe Files and more | 07 Oct 2020 | 00:15:26 | |
Corey Haines is the founder of Swipe Files, he also runs refactoring growth, mental models for marketing, hey marketers and he was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics. I've been a follower of Corey for a while and impressed by the level and consistency of everything he produces. In this episode we talked about:
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Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. Full Transcript James: You've got a lot going on. Tell me a little bit more about your various side projects, where your main focus is right now. Corey: Yeah. So I don't know, maybe I just caught the entrepreneurial bug or have an itch to create stuff. But, about two years ago I started just making stuff on the side. I started with a newsletter actually that ended up shutting down later, but it was called the TLDR on SaaS marketing. And that was like my first entry point into creating something and sharing it online and it's actually the reason why I created my Twitter account in the first place. and then, yeah, it's just been through a little bit of. serendipity and connection between projects. um, you know, I was talking with a Baremetrics customer, actually. And he's like, Hey, where do I find someone like you? where would you post a job if you were hiring yourself? And I was like, actually, I don't know. There isn't really like a job board for marketers. So I went out and built it. Later on I was talking about different mental models and frameworks that I've found really helpful for my work at Baremetrics. Other people were asking for the Notion doc and you know where to learn more about it. So I figured out why don't I just package this up into a course, same thing with B2B SaaS marketing, with what we've done at Baremetrics is figuring out how to create this new course too. Now Swipe Files, I would swipe something and I would write some notes, some bullet points about here's, what I think is great about it and then I noticed this is actually pretty useful because there's a few sites out there, like swipefile.com and Swipe Worthy, or I think it's swiped.co, which are fantastic sources of inspiration, but you still have to do the work to figure out what you want to glean from it. So Swipe Files is my attempt to build a library of content where I will tell you and show you what it is you can take away from it instead of having to deduce it for yourself. And now I've got a bunch of other things I'll do in the future, but, yesterday went full time as a creator on my own stuff. James: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that. So previously you head of growth at Baremetrics. How long were you there for and, what went into making decision that now is the right time to leave? Corey: I was there for almost two years and had a fantastic time, experimented with a ton. We grew about 30% which was great for a bootstrapped company. I really changed a lot and I was all over the place with, trying to find different channels and breakthroughs, and really what we came to was that company wasn't at the right spot to really support a growth role with the budget and the engineering time that was needed to really push the ball forward and so just decided to part ways. And I was already the place that I wanted to go full time and my own stuff anyways I think coincidentally, a little bit serendipitously was perfectly the timing for me to start working on my own stuff full time and, head on to this new chapter of my life. James: So with your various side projects, or they're not side projects now that you're full time projects, How do they each look in terms of revenue what's making the most for you? Corey: Yeah right now the breadwinner are the courses, refactoring growth and mental models for marketing and I've done about 36,000 in the last 10 months. I couldn't do what I'm doing today without that revenue on the side, to be able to, fund myself into going full time as a creator. The other one, now that I'm trying to build into becoming the breadwinner is Swipe Files. And to date I actually, I couldn't tell you the revenue that has done, I think it's probably done a couple thousand in revenue because it's split between monthly annual in lifetimes. It's a little bit more difficult for me to... I didn't go through Stripe and do the math beforehand. but, um, it does about like the MRR today is about a thousand dollars. and then, Hey Marketers, to be honest, I've started to neglected for the last year. I launched it and then I spent a good four or five months working really hard on it. And then figured I would outsource it to my nephew, who is a poor college student and, and needs some cheap, manual labor. It still does $100 to $300 a month, maybe. And it's a pay what you want model too. So sometimes I'll get a job posting for one dollar and sometimes I'll get a job posting for a hundred bucks. But it depends. James: so you've got all of these projects so much going on now. How do you squeeze it all in? And how did you manage your time before? I guess this week? Corey: The answer is I didn't, and I'm going to figure it out now. When I was with Baremetrics full time, I was very much working in these sprints. With Hey Marketers; I created the job for within three weekends and then I would just work here and there nights and weekends, especia... | |||
| How VEED grew to $1.7m ARR in less than 2 years - Sabba Keynejad, Veed.io | 24 Sep 2020 | 00:15:00 | |
Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder and CEO of VEED - an online video editing platform. VEED is a fully-fledged collaborative video editing product used by many influencers, coaches and businesses for adding subtitles, captions, text, merging videos, making meme videos, turning podcasts to videos and much more. What we covered in this episode: On Veed
On growth and marketing
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Follow Sabba Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
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| What's important for indie hackers in 2020 - Courtland Allen, Indie Hackers | 21 Sep 2020 | 00:15:05 | |
Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers in 2016, grew the business $8k MRR with sponsors, and then sold to Stripe 9 months later. An inspirational story that doesn't end there. Courtland has now been working from within Stripe for the past 4 years, where he continues to build on the platform and produce the excellent Indie Hackers podcast. He's a fountain of knowledge and I think you'll love this episode. What we covered in this episode: On Indie Hackers:
On indie hacking:
Quick fire
Follow Courtland Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. Full Transcript James: Courtland has inspired so many of us to build our profitable internet businesses. Let's talk to him to find out what's important as an indie hacker in 2020. Courtland, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Courtland: Excellent James. Thanks for having me. James: To set the scene and for those that might not know, tell me a little bit more about what Indie Hackers is and why you started the website? Courtland: Yeah. So I moved to the Bay Area when I was like 23. I wanted to start a very stereotypical high growth tech startup. I wanted to be a unicorn company. I wanted to make billions and be world famous. After seven or so years of that struggle, I was just tired of it. I got tired of the VC funded software world. And so I took time off work. I was doing a lot of contract development and I just started searching for other examples of people who've done the same thing. And it turns out there wasn't really a good way to learn how to do this. Everybody online was doing the same thing I was doing; just like looking for comments left by Pieter Levels or like tweets where some people would share some tidbit of their story, but like we couldn't find anything great. And so I kind of just solved my own problem and said, you know, I should build the thing that helps people do this. I was surprised it didn't exist. And here we are 4 years later, somewhat ironically, I decided that I wanted to be a bootstrapper. I decided that I wanted to get out of the high growth startup game. And within a year, starting Indie Hackers, it was acquired by Stripe and fulfilled one of the goals of a lot of people in the high growth startup game want to. So that's how we got to where we are today. James: What is your definition of an indie hacker? Courtland: I think Tyler Tringas actually put it well recently. He said that "the new American dream is to build a profitable, sustainable, remote software business that you can run from home ". You can run from wherever you want work with wherever you want, that scales nicely, and that prints money for you. And I think an indie hacker is somebody who's trying to achieve that. Someone who doesn't like the status quo, someone who doesn't want to work for the man for the rest of their life. There's no problem with doing that. I think jobs provide a lot of stability for people, a lot of predictability, but if you're like me, you just don't want to have a boss. You don't want there to be a cap on your salary. You don't want somebody else telling you what to work on. You want to control your own life and you're an indie hacker. James: What are the challenges and benefits of building Indie Hackers from within Stripe? Courtland: I don't have to get on the phone with advertisers anymore. Indie Hackers makes $0. It's a hundred percent just me focusing on making the community good and helping it grow. I think probably the one challenge is that I'm someone who puts a lot of pressure on my shoulders to, I think, perform well for others. And at Stripe, Patrick Collison is my boss. He went out on a limb and acquired Indie Hackers, and I feel a lot of pressure to make sure that any hackers, is a success. And at Stripe, like I'm extremely autonomous. I talk to Patrick and the team there once every three months, once every six months, sometimes, and it's almost always just check-ins; how are you doing? Do you need anything? What can we help with et cetera? It's like the ideal working situation. I can't imagine having a job under any other kind of framework. James: Are you tied to any goals within Stripe? Do they set any targets for you that you have to reach, such as traffic numbers or engagement? Courtland: There isn't any sort of like you have to reach X number or the axe will fall. I think what's cool about the fact that I joined Stripe is that my goals are very much aligned with theirs. And I think if you ever work with any sort of partner or you acquire anyone or you get acquired, you should always try to make sure your goals are aligned because if there's even a one degree difference between where you want to go and where they go, at first that's very small, but after a number of years, that gap has widened into something that's like very hard to fix. And so I just want Indie Hackers to be like as big and as meaningful and useful as possible. I think about that religiously every single day. And that's what Stripe wants to ultimately they want more people starting companies... | |||
| $3k MRR with 600 paying members writing about mindful productivity - Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs | 18 Sep 2020 | 00:15:46 | |
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a learning platform dedicated to mindful productivity while also studying neuroscience part-time at King's College with her masters. Previously Anne-Laure worked at Google leaving that job in 2017. As part of Ness Labs, she creates some truly exceptional content that I've had shared with me time and time again, which is evidenced by her 19,000 strong email lists for her newsletter, Maker Mind. Here's what we covered in this episode: On Ness Labs
On mindful productivity
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James: Anne-Laure, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Anne-Laure: Great. Thanks for having me. James: Good to have you. Tell me a little bit more about Ness Labs for people who don't know? What's it all about? Anne-Laure: Ness Labs is a platform for ambitious makers, knowledge workers, creators who want to be their most productive and creative without sacrificing or mental health, and so it offers content, a community, and also coaching for people to achieve these goals. James: Yeah. And where did you come up with the idea? Anne-Laure: I both at Google and while working at startups, I went through burnout and I think lots of ambitious people have this experience at some point in their work life. And when I was looking for resources to help me go through this, there's actually wasn't much out there. So it started with this goal of helping people really taking care of their mental health at work. I've always been fascinated with how the mind works, how the brain works, how do we think, or where do ideas come from? How do we make decisions? So that's always been an area that I've been really curious about. James: Yeah, absolutely. Where are you at now in terms of subscribers and revenue with Ness Labs? And was it always generating revenue? Anne-Laure: So in the first six months of Ness Labs, most of the revenue was coming from sponsors. And I didn't really like this model because it meant having to chase them, a lot of back and forth. Also quite irregular revenue where some weeks, I have three sponsors reaching out and saying, "hey, can I start with the newsletter?" and some weeks there was no one. I figured that really wanted to have some recurring revenue that I could, even if it was growing slowly, sell something that is a bit more stable. And at this point I have about 600 members and the Ness Labs community generating about $3,000 a month. And that doesn't include all of the, one time revenue that nest labs leaking through books and other products that I'm selling. James: It's amazing how you've grown it and I think that there'll be a lot of indie hackers who are at that level where they're trying to build something up and deciding on a monetization model. Why at the start did you go for the sponsorship route and also, how did you start to build your newsletter list, which made it appealing for sponsors? Anne-Laure: At the very beginning, with the sponsors, I didn't really have any outbound process. I just grew the newsletter and I made it clear with the little inserts and signed it, that there was a spot here. So if any reader was also either an entrepreneur or working at a company that was relevant to the audience, I was reaching that they could just reply back and claim that spot for the next newsletter. There was no outbound work, but I think that making it very clear that this spot existed and also having a very niche topic made it appealing to sponsors because they could in one go reach a certain amount of people. The audience; I can really think Twitter, I think, for most of my subscribers. James: How beneficial has that Twitter following been for you? Cause you have about 30,000 Twitter followers. And over how long was that built? Was there a specific time where you just started growing or was it quite linear? Anne-Laure: It was very linear and slow for years and I think up to two years ago, I only have 3000 followers. It took off pretty recently. And I think it's because I really changed the way I used it. I used to just post whatever articles I was reading, not really contributing value. Whereas now I'm really trying to help people and I really use Twitter to work public. So I really show people my process. I show unfinished articles. Sometimes I ask questions. I do polls where I really ask the community, what do you think about this? Should I write about this or that? And I think the fact that I switched from just broadcasting content on Twitter, to working in public with the garage door open, has been one of the main reasons why my following has grown so fast in the past year. I think lots of entrepreneurs make the mistake of falling prey to the planning fallacy. Where you spend so much time trying to figure out how am I going to go about this? What's the best framework to build this? And which library should I use? And how am I going to do this and that? And I think for me, building in public is a way to fight the planning fallacy, where instead of waiting until they have something absolutely perfect that I can put in the world, I just share little nuggets of my progress and I can get feedback much quicker. So it shortens the feedback loop too, which is especially I think... | |||
| Starting over 40 side-projects in 10 years - Helen Ryles | 16 Sep 2020 | 00:15:07 | |
Helen Ryles is a prolific indie hacker, having launched over 40 projects in the last 10 years, selling a few of them along the way. Helen is a proponent of the no code movement, advocating for the tools that allow non-technical folks, like me, create amazing projects. To tie in with this, she also runs the community at Makerpad, the no-code education and community platform. Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
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| Building Marketing Examples to 30k email subscribers - Harry Dry, Marketing Examples | 10 Sep 2020 | 00:15:27 | |
Harry Dry is the founder of Marketing Examples, a fast-growing showcase of successful startup marketing stories. When I first spoke to Harry on the Marketing Mashup about a year ago, he was on 5,000 subscribers and £1k revenue. Now, he has 6x that amount with 30,000 subscribers and 50,000 Twitter followers. An incredible growth story from a smart marketer. In 2022, Harry also created Copywriting Examples, the site for anyone writing new copy.
On Audience Building
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Links Follow Me Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. ‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’ ‘Absolutely love this community.’ These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts. Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month. | |||
| Growing a paid community to $800 MRR - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club (prev. Weekend Club) | 07 Sep 2020 | 00:13:37 | |
In this episode we discuss: On Ramen Club (formerly Weekend Club)
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| Indie Bites Trailer - what's it all about? | 04 Sep 2020 | 00:01:39 | |
I'm your host James McKinven, I'm the founder of a podcasting company called Striqo and passionate indie hacker. Now I love long podcasts and what Courtland Allen has done with the Indie Hackers show, but this podcast will just supplement that. With less commuting, we now have less time to listen to podcasts and those long, albeit interesting, backstories. I'll aim to cut to the chase and find out what it really takes to build a sustainable, profitable business on the side. I'm James, I run a podcast company called Striqo and I love hearing about the ups and downs of what it takes to be an indie hacker. I'm a fellow indie hacker and side-project-starter and I love hearing the stories of other makers who have started their businesses while working a full-time job. Whether that's a small little earner on the side or something that has grown into tens of thousands of ££ income that means you could quit your job. Having started many of my own side-projects I know how hard it is to get it off the ground and generate revenue. I wouldn't have been able to make progress on any of my projects if it wasn't for the kindness and support I've received from everyone in the Indie Hackers community. Everyone has a story to tell, advice they can give and lessons to teach - I want to share them with as many people as I can. I hope you can join me for this podcast talking to our favourite indie hackers. If you like the sound of this, please subscribe to the podcast and tweet me which indie hacker you'd like me to feature. | |||
| B2C vs B2B SaaS as an indie hacker - Val Sopi, Blogstatic | 03 Jan 2024 | 00:17:00 | |
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 platform, or attempt to build a B2B SaaS, which he believes is a much more sustainable option for an indie founder. Val has been hardened by business successes and failures, so I love his pragmatic approach to the decisions he’s making. Timestamps
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| How VEED bootstrapped to $7m ARR - Sabba Keynejad, VEED.io (2020) | 27 Dec 2023 | 00:14:23 | |
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 interview, VEED was just a small product that wasn't generating any revenue. This episode is special to me because I’ve followed VEED’s journey from the start and it’s been inspiring to see. Timestamps
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| Lemon Squeezy CTO on why he still makes side projects - Gilbert Pellegrom | 20 Dec 2023 | 00:16:12 | |
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 despite being the CTO of a rapidly scaling startup, he’s still making and shipping side projects, which we’ll talk about more on this episode. If you want to hear more about Lemon Squeezy, I actually co-host their podcast called Make Lemonade, where I speak with their CEO JR Farr about the behind the scenes of building a bootstrapped company making millions. Sign up to the Indie Bites membership for $60 a year to access the full conversation with Gilbert. Timestamps
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| Scaling and exiting a $65k MRR with meal planning app - Jeffrey Bunn, Mealime & Clearful | 13 Dec 2023 | 00:17:14 | |
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 market. Timestamps Recommendations
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| The slow and steady path to growth - Michael Christofides | 06 Dec 2023 | 00:16:55 | |
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 terms and has been committed to his project for years. In this episode I want to unpack why Michael stays committed to his product despite slow growth, his unique approach to the indie lifestyle and where he wants to go in future. Timestamps
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| Arvid Kahl on side projects, hobbies and making money as a founder | 29 Nov 2023 | 00:17:06 | |
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, Danielle.
👉 Get the full 55 minute conversation here. Timestamps
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| Quitting his job and taking a £20k loan to go full time indie - Harvey Carpenter, Growform | 22 Nov 2023 | 00:15:49 | |
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. Timestamps
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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 get to ramen profitability - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club | 15 Nov 2023 | 00:15:49 | |
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 episodes and taking a bet on me early on. Timestamps
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| Ranking #1 in Google with Lorem Ipsum and making a career out of scientific SEO - Kyle Roof | 14 Jun 2024 | 00:14:51 | |
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. Timestamps
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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 EmailOctopus to $3m+ ARR - Jonathan Bull & Tom Evans | 08 Nov 2023 | 00:17:11 | |
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 chosen to compete on price rather than in a niche and their reasoning behind staying bootstrapped for so long. Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership
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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 financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson | 01 Nov 2023 | 00:15:48 | |
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 businesses don’t address as early and seriously as they should. There a ton of actionable tips in this conversation about how to manage your finances, building a solid, profitable business and what to do when things aren’t going well. Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership Timestamps
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| Rob Walling on multiple projects, why building an audience is dumb and other SaaS wisdom | 13 Oct 2023 | 00:17:09 | |
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/membership Timestamps
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| Growing an audience, making difficult decisions and launching screencasting.com - Aaron Francis | 05 Oct 2023 | 00:16:53 | |
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
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| $20k MRR with Airtable app using YouTube and SEO for growth - Andy Cloke, Data Fetcher | 28 Sep 2023 | 00:15:30 | |
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
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| Making $200k a year teaching Google Sheets - Andrew Kamphey | 21 Sep 2023 | 00:14:48 | |
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
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| Bootstrapping Ticket Tailor to £6m ARR, selling and repurchasing the company, losing motivation and more - Jonny White | 04 Sep 2023 | 00:16:33 | |
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. Get the hour long episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership Timestamps
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| Carving a new life path with a newsletter about Workspaces - Ryan Gilbert, Workspaces | 03 Aug 2023 | 00:15:32 | |
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
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| Taking on Bit.ly bootstrapped - Tim Leland, T.LY | 21 Jul 2023 | 00:16:19 | |
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.
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| Working towards life-changing outcomes as an indie hacker - Colleen Schnettler, HelloQuery | 04 Jul 2023 | 00:15:38 | |
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. Now Colleen is working on a product called HelloQuery, a reporting tool for SQL queries which has been accepted into a recent TinySeed batch. What we covered:
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| Finding success with a QR code app after selling his previous indie business - Ramy Khuffash | 31 May 2024 | 00:16:21 | |
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. Timestamps
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| Gamifying products, shipping quickly and knowing when to quit - Marc Louvion | 14 Jun 2023 | 00:16:09 | |
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
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| Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise | 01 Jun 2023 | 00:15:47 | |
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. Timestamps
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| How to find and validate your ideas - Bram Kanstein, Startup Stash / No Code MVP | 27 May 2023 | 00:15:58 | |
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
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| Growing Frontend Mentor to 500k users and $30k MRR - Matt Studdert | 30 Apr 2023 | 00:16:02 | |
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:
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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 | 19 Apr 2023 | 00:17:03 | |
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
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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 | 12 Apr 2023 | 00:16:30 | |
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. Timestamps Recommendations
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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. | |||