I end up at a strip club with a bunch of like 50 or 60 year old female maid service owners until like 3.30 in the morning. I wake up at 5.30 in the morning after 2 hours of sleep to my phone absolutely blowing up right? Because the redesign launch did not go well. Hello and welcome back to Indie Bites of podcast rubbing you stories, fellow Indie hackers in 50 minutes or less. Today I'm joined by Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid and
service service just crossed 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 a somewhat unsexy niche aka not selling to other Indie hackers. I see you in the audience. This can lead to a phenomenal business which Amar has today. Now if you're inspired by this episode and want to go out and make your own
newsletter or side project in the niche of your choice, I have just a tool for you. That is of course email octopus who are an email platform focused on affordability to have a very generous free plan and ace of use without all of these bloated features that I certainly hate. So you can focus on shipping and growing your audience which regular list is essential for your growth. So to get started with an email platform just get
out of the way. You can contact up to 2500 people for free head to email octopus.com or hit the link in the show notes. Or if you upgrade to their free plan you've got 30% off using the coupon Indie Bites. Amar welcome to the pod how you doing? Doing great thanks for having me James. So take us back to 2013. What were you doing sort of before ZenMaid and how did a service for maze come about seems like such an
odd niche for an Indie hack to get into. From a career perspective I was working in sales I was doing sales for a tech company in Southern California and during that time I came across a blog post that was essentially how to start a home services business specifically a cleaning business like from home without doing any of the cleaning and essentially a friend of mine you know we're having a conversation it came up that he had seen the same
post and actually begun king on it. So fast forward approximately a year and we've been running a maid service together for like for that time. So that takes us to 2013. I switched jobs move from Southern California to Northern California and we shut down the maid service in the process but the hidden benefit of that was that during that year we had built in a very simple backend scheduling tool into our actual website that you know
essentially we turned into a sass. So this is like the slack story where they were a studio and then they spun off slack with their internal mesh and tool for you with your own made service
you couldn't find any software that fit your needs exactly. So hey you built it and took me through your first two years because starting 2013 2015 you started paying yourself and you went traveling we will talk about that but those first few couple of years I believe you scaled to around 8k mr r what were you doing and were some of those things you were doing back in 2013 still relevant now or is it a completely different game now do you
think. Essentially in a nutshell what we did was we used call email to get the first hundred customers or so and at point along the way my co-founder applied to join one of the cleaning groups and the admin of the cleaning group she wasn't happy with her software
vendor at the time contacted us and I think the first day that we talked to her that she told us one thing that she wanted in the software and me and my co-founder pulled an all-nighter to go back to her the following day and to show her hey this is the exact customized work
order that you asked for and so that single partnership opened up the next probably 50 or so leads in terms of do these things still work I do think that lots of things are more challenging because in general the world has just gotten noisier so for us we did it with call email now
it's a little bit more difficult it's easy for any company to send call email back then we had to generate our own lists we were using like you know Gmail for a while until a couple of the tools came out and all of that stuff and so because there was that friction and that barrier to
entry for lots of other people it made it that much more effective for us because we were able to jump through those obstacles and through through those hurdles so I do think the same principles work but you know anything that's been around for a long time you're gonna have a an increasing like
ad cost whether it actually costs you money or whether it costs you time unlike the maid niche I guess you could call it when in the hackers are trying to like discover niches that they're going to build their products in they're often thinking okay well what like high value niches those that
are not as price sensitive were you thinking about that when you said because obviously you understand the made businesses a lot more were they like kind of price sensitive or were you like we've done our own thing this is a problem that needs to be solved and I think there's enough
businesses out there that can buy the software or whatever price we put out when I started the company my initial co-founder actually approached me and suggested that we actually tried contacting doctors lawyers a couple of other professions before we moved to made services for the exact
reasons that you just outlined so it felt like we were kind of throwing in the towel and going for made services which are much more price sensitive and just complain about the silliest things in hindsight though that's actually been really big for us because it's really difficult even for
company that came into compete with us even if they had funding it would probably still take them four to five years to get traction within the industry and to make enough money to justify those sorts of things and so with that in mind like we were kind of the incumbent now and just the
difficulty of the industry and the low willingness to pay that in and of itself is a massive mode for us which is pretty amazing that's interesting yeah the first five years sucked I've never heard like price sensitivity being an advantage and I don't know if it's rep
you can replicate it at mark because you started this 10 years ago and you started it while doing your full-time jobs and then when you left you did not take much money from it because you were traveling yeah I mean if someone is wants to be in it for the long haul and they're willing to
deal with price sensitive customers and want to build that mode that makes it really hard to break into then suppose it's an issue to choose yeah and I mean it is hindsight though right it's not like I would did with this plan right it's just it's just 10 or 11 years later how I'm like you know
a new competitor enters and I'm like come talk to me in five years if you still exist in five years then I will take you seriously so you didn't pay yourself to choose in the business after that point you went traveling in Thailand which I believe is where you met your wife friend what why
travel the world is this because of that freedom thing you found from four hour work week yeah I think I think the four hour work week one I mean the reason that I think it's impacted so many people is because it was such an inspirational book not because it was necessarily a great tactical
guide to traveling the world or starting a business but I do think it was another thing if it was like it was you know I was young and impressionable I think it was like the cool thing to do it was something that I genuinely did want to do of going and like and traveling the world but the other
thing is I'm from California so I grew up in a really high cost of living area I looked at my finances at some point when I was still working my day job in Palo Alto and just realized that even with staying
there and making all of this money I wasn't actually saving any money I wasn't putting more money in the bank than I was before and when I realized that I realized that I could jump on a flight to Thailand lower my expenses to six or eight hundred dollars a month and then all of a sudden the money
that Zen made could pay me would actually cover my costs and I could focus full time on my thing instead of spending you know nine to five every day focusing on building someone else's dream well I'm all like traveling building the business it all sounds very lovely at this point but at
one point in 2017 you chose to redesign the business and you lost 40% of your revenue over six months what made you stick with that and not like reverse it let's see I was forced essentially if we like rolled it back it was just gonna make everything even worse that it wasn't just a redesign
of like how everything looked but it was like a change to various data structures and that was part of the reason it was such a mess so in a nutshell what happened was we'd been working on this redesign we put in probably a hundred thousand dollars and this is when we were not making a ton of
money and as we got closer to being ready to release it we decided the perfect time to release it would be at the annual cleaning industry convention in Las Vegas I get to Las Vegas for this event the team and I decide that they will take it live around midnight on I believe it was Monday night
the idea was they're gonna take it live and then they're gonna be awake for a couple of hours after that to monitor everything to debug things to make sure that nothing goes like goes wrong all of that stuff so I end up at a strip club with a bunch of like 50 or 60 year old female made service
owners that dragged me in one of the other industry guys to a strip club until like 3 30 in the morning I wake up at 5 30 in the morning after two hours of sleep to my phone absolutely blowing up right because the redesign launch did not go well critically take down the software from Monday
to Thursday all the while while I'm at this annual convention and having to show my face everywhere and still having to show up for this stuff and so me and my team members that were there it was me and two other team members we were locked in a hotel room for the next like 18 or like 22 hours
then like from five in the morning I left the room at like 9 p.m. because I had to make a cameo appearance at one of like the industry events for like for drinks but other than that we were just locked in this room just like doing support and like the devs were on the other side of the world
essentially doing the same things in their homes just as all hands on deck it went terribly although I do have to say that when it was all said and done and when the dust settled every new user that came in and used the new redesign and didn't go through the actual transition period were blown away
by like the new version of the software and so that's why like even though we lost 40% of the recurring revenue it was 40% of like the existing recurring revenue when we launched it the new business that we picked up more than made up for it so it still ended up like working out but it was
it was not a fun one it was not a fun experience no I can just imagine what the warts must have been going through your head at that network and drinks you went to while your company was crumbling so Emma you've gone through some impressive growth over the years there were three growth tactics
that I noticed that I've heard you've done another podcast you had your made summit you created free logos for made and you've also got your Facebook group that you started back in 2014 have you had like one main growth driver of the years or can you talk about some of those things
that I mentioned there's never been any sort of magic bullet but the closest thing to a magic bullet for Zenmade was doing the made summit which you can see at made summit.com we literally saw the first year that we did that the following six months after doing the made summit we saw
every single one of our metrics across our like sales and marketing funnel increase that we saw higher conversion rates more leads all of all of like that stuff that there was something about like the brand building and the trust that was built through that and it's in a nutshell the made summit
I think most listeners are going to be familiar with what a virtual summit is in the made service industry we bring together anywhere from 40 to I think one year is high as 60 industry experts we're very focused on people that specifically serve our industry not a random accountant for small
businesses and stuff like that and yeah that's been massive for us it's helped to drive a ton of partnerships for us because now we deliver the audience to some of the consultants so yeah that would be the biggest single thing that we have done the Facebook group we have two Facebook groups
we have the Zenmade mastermind and the Zenmade inner circle one is for our users and trial users the other is for all made services in like in the industry and that was when we started I think in 2014 or 2015 and the second year I think that that we had that running when I went to the annual
industry conference I would walk around the hallways and would hear people asking if others saw XYZ thread in the Zenmade mastermind that a lot of folks in our industry heard about the Zenmade mastermind the Facebook group long before they heard about Zenmade the software so a kind of lead
are marketing a bit a bit there I want to talk about something that I've noticed about you having looked at your background here having listened to another podcast which is like I feel like you're inspired by a lot of these hustle porn gods you're Gary Veeja Tim Ferris and like a lot of indie
hackers I don't know could it be snobbishly look down on this stuff it's like no no I'm trying to build a better life for myself that I don't want to do this hustling that all these guys talk about do you think that some indie hackers just don't work hard enough because they don't want to
and maybe they should maybe they should take some inspiration from these hustle porn guys yeah I do I want what I think that it really comes down to is I think that a lot of people have defined the life that they want to live and instead of trying to do the work that's necessary to get to that point
they instead try to live that life immediately while also trying to accomplish the goals that they like need to long term to sustain that lifestyle and so for me my ultimate goal is to see how far I can grow Zen made while keeping my current lifestyle and so with that in mind I like going to these guys that are the business gurus that are maybe saying you've got a hustle hustle hustle that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to hustle hustle hustle but I think that their messages are really
are really actually like actually on point and that if you're not living the life that you want to like right now or today you could probably take something out of a lot of these hustle porn like books right and what I'll also say is on people wanting wanting the ideal life but not
being prepared to put in the work to get there I think I see often and also for me like I know what life I want and I've tried to live that but I've not done the work to get there and I've had to go through like a little bit of like rediscovery of myself like James you got to work a little bit
fucking hard to do if you're going to get to where you want to be and you need to put in these hours while you still can while you're young and have the time to do it so then you can live the life that you want but like make that as enjoyable as you can make those flexible as you can but there are going to be times where it's kind of shit and not that enjoyable and then you'll
like enjoy the times where it is really enjoyable. Well Emma you've been a great guest me thank you so much for coming on the show in some of the Zenmade story now I end every episode on three recommendations no explanation needed a book a podcast in india. The book is the fish that ate the whale by rich Cohen that I have up here this is the best book for entrepreneurs that most entrepreneurs have never heard of podcasts I have two just the recent ones that I've been listening to that I wasn't
familiar with before the exit five podcast by Dave something yeah and then the other one is the new podcast from Sam par which is money wise which is on like yeah like just dealing with like finances and stuff like that it's just money talked about in a way that you don't hear about very
often I'll give I'll give it I'll give a shout out to Jesse Hanley from from from bento from bento now.com for sure and thank you so much joining me on this episode of Indie Bites thanks for having James thank you for listening to this episode of Indie Bites a big thank you to my sponsor Ema Rottweiss for making the show happen that's all from me see you next week