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 Bot at $200 MRR When to stop working on projects How RailsDevs started with a spreadsheet Solving a prob...
Sep 13, 2022•16 min•Ep. 66
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 business Going into an established, durable market Why not raise for the company? Single focus vs portfolio of s...
Sep 06, 2022•16 min•Ep. 65
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 own problem. 👉 Extended version of this episode . What we covered in this episode: How Peergrade started in ...
Aug 30, 2022•15 min•Ep. 64
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 all off, wrote a book called Find Joy in Chaos . What we covered in this episode: Building credibility Takin...
Aug 22, 2022•16 min•Ep. 63
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 app, she’s made it work. From a solo indie project to now raising a $690k pre-seed round, Marie is making he...
Aug 08, 2022•15 min•Ep. 62
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 wondering why you’re not getting anywhere with them. In this episode, Chris is going to explain why. What we c...
May 28, 2022•16 min•Ep. 61
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 McKinsey, before being a pivotal early employee at London FinTech GoCardless, to then cycling around the world...
May 14, 2022•16 min•Ep. 60
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 discussions with some of the biggest SaaS founders out there. As for podcasting, Daniel’s dipped in there t...
May 07, 2022•15 min•Ep. 59
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 here he worked at the acquiring company for 5 years, before starting ANOTHER startup, called Weav, a product ...
May 03, 2022•16 min•Ep. 58
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, products and even book he eventually landed on Trends, which didn’t actually make any money for the first ...
Apr 29, 2022•15 min•Ep. 57
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 last year, as she grew her portfolio of projects from $30k to over $100k. What we covered in this episode: Ho...
Apr 26, 2022•15 min•Ep. 56
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: Pierre's background; inspiration from his father Running a business within World of Warcraft Meeting his co-foun...
Apr 22, 2022•15 min•Ep. 55
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 hitting big with Testimonial. He’s also built some other fantastic products, such as embed.so and channel.so ...
Apr 19, 2022•16 min•Ep. 54
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 Doist How going full-time has impacted MentorCruise What Dom’s day-to-day looks like Not feeling guilty about unpr...
Apr 15, 2022•15 min•Ep. 53
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 interesting about Spencer is that he's actually raised funding for Podia, and I wanted to find out why a seasoned b...
Apr 12, 2022•15 min•Ep. 52
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 him -which was Twitter. Dago went for 15 years chasing money, but then realised that wasn’t the course to h...
Apr 08, 2022•16 min•Ep. 51
Jim Raptis, an indie hacker from Greece who is working full-time on his portfolio of projects, including BrandBird and Magic Pattern, which are both doing $1,500 MRR. If you’ve seen those cool screenshots on Twitter with the nice drop shadow and gradient background, those are made with Brand Bird. What we covered in this episode Quitting running a funded startup for indie hacking Earning that first dollar Learning design as an engineer Launching a product with less than 300 followers Choosing to...
Apr 04, 2022•16 min•Ep. 50
In this episode I’ve got my first ever returning guest with Dianna Allen and first ever double act as we’re joined by her fiance Jeremy Blalock. I spoke to Dianna about a year ago after growing her handmade candle business from $100 to $50k in that year. Since then Dianna is still running TERRA and doubled the revenue in 2021, but has also co-founded Inventora which has just hit $5k MRR. Inventora is inventory tracking system for handmade businesses, solving Dianna’s own problem with TERRA. 👉 J...
Mar 27, 2022•16 min•Ep. 49
Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad , the platform that allows creators to sell products online. The beating heart of the creator economy. You'll likely have heard Sahil's story about his failure to build a billion dollar company with an article that went viral, but let me summarise for those that haven't. Sahil founded Gumroad in 2011, aiming to build the next unicorn, leaving Pinterest where he was employee #2. He raised $1.1m from angels, then $7m more in 2012. Things started growing, th...
Mar 16, 2022•15 min•Ep. 48
Brett Williams is the founder of Designjoy , a one-man productised design service that is doing over $130k MRR, charging clients up to $5k a month for unlimited design. You indeed hear that right, Brett is running a million dollar business solo with over 40 clients. What we covered in this episode: $50k per year with a Tumblr blog Dropping out of college and getting a regular job How Brett started Designjoy Being inspired by Design Pickle Launching Designjoy Taking 3 years to get to $10k MRR Non...
Mar 14, 2022•16 min•Ep. 47
Val Hinov is the founder of Thankbox an online group card tool that grew to $20k p/m throughout lockdown. Now Val is facing the challenges of what to do when your product scales, what to do when the wave that brought you success starts to slow and when your product has one-time purchase pricing model. What we covered in this episode: Where the idea for Thankbox came from? Lessons learned from a failed startup How he built Thankbox in 2 months How he got his first users for Thankbox Building a vi...
Mar 07, 2022•15 min•Ep. 46
Che Sampat is an 18 year old Indie Hacker who built SuperPay in 2019 when he was 15 years old, an app that lets you generate easy payment links through Stripe and Square. Since then he's grown it to 5k users, $6k in revenue and processed a whopping $15m in payments. Che has also been working at some cool companies since he was young, recently joining the payments startup Fast to focus on his career, therefore stepping back from SuperPay. What we covered in this episode How Che got into coding Bu...
Feb 25, 2022•16 min•Ep. 45
In this episode we’re joined by Tom Ross, who is the founder of Design Cuts , a marketplace and community for creatives which he’s grown to a team of 20 over the past decade. Tom is also a seasoned podcaster, co-hosting The Honest Designer's Show and Biz Buds which have been downloaded millions of times. It's not all been plain sailing for Tom as he ran into severe burnout working 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 18 months, leading to him being hospitalised. In this episode we're going to find ou...
Feb 08, 2022•16 min•Ep. 44
Marie Martens the co-founder of Tally , an easy way to create forms online. She left her stable marketing job to start Tally with her partner in crime Filip and became an indie hacker. Since then they've grown Tally to over 16,000 users almost $10k MRR as they work towards becoming default alive. Through a mix of manual prospecting, a successful product hunt launch and product-led growth, they’ve turned Tally into an exceptional indie success story. -> Subscribe to my brand new podcast, No Mo...
Feb 03, 2022•15 min•Ep. 43
Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad , a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, ...
Jan 29, 2022•17 min•Ep. 42
Ben Orenstein is the founder of Tuple , a tool for remote pair programmers that has been steadily growing for the past few years. Now, Ben runs Tuple with a small team and is delving into what happens when your SaaS starts to hit scale. You might have also heard Ben's voice on the Art of Product podcast, which he co-hosts with Derrick Reimer , founder of SavvyCal, talking about the behind the scenes of running their respective SaaS companies. What we covered in this episode: Why Tuple is the mos...
Jan 24, 2022•16 min•Ep. 41
Today I’m joined by Kenneth Cassel the founder of Pointer.gg a product he pivoted from Slip.so , a course platform making it easy for developers to make high-quality interactive courses. He got inspiration for Slip when he built vim.so , a course made $10k in just one month with - his first internet money. It's not all been plain sailing for Kenneth, as he struggled with failing his way to eventual success, with 4 years building products with no revenue. Now with Slip, he's quit his job, been ac...
Jan 15, 2022•16 min•Ep. 40
Peter Suhm is the co-founder of Reform , a tool that lets you easily create simple, brandable forms. Peter is also part of the Tiny Seed 1st batch, where he was working on a product called branch Branch . After that didn't work out, he went through a period of testing and validating ideas. One of those ideas was a investor update tool, where Peter discovered how convoluted creating a form with existing tools was. Using Twitter and a very early stage MVP, he validated the idea for Reform and got ...
Nov 18, 2021•16 min•Ep. 39
Brian Casel is a veteran of the bootstrapping game, having left his full-time job back in 2008. You might have heard him on the Boostrapped Web podcast where he shares his journey starting and building software products. Over the years Brian has pretty much done it all, built software businesses, courses, productized services and even sold some along the way. Most recently, Brian has been working on ZipMessage , a new way to communicate asynchronously. ➡️ Get the uncut, 60 minute recording with ...
Nov 13, 2021•16 min•Ep. 38
In 2019 Daniel Vassallo left his $500k salaried job at Amazon to go indie . In the 2 years since he left Daniel has placed many small bets, something he's become known for. In particular Daniel has seen success from his Info Products and building his audience on Twitter , which has grown from 0 to 91k. He wrote a short book on the good parts of AWS , which has made $126,000, then following the Twitter growth, wrote a book called Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience , which has made $244,000. He...
Nov 08, 2021•16 min•Ep. 37
