Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, a simple, privacy focused analytics tool launched in 2019. I last spoke to Jack on the podcast in 2021, where he talked about the inception and growth of Fathom, taking on a massive incumbent and why Jack loves working with a co-founder. In December 2024, Jack acquired his co-founder’s share in the business, making him the sole owner (i think). Today, we’re going to talk about why he made this unique move and what’s next for Fathom. Timestamps 00...
Apr 16, 2025•14 min•Ep. 126
Sam Shore is the co-founder of Typeshare , a writing platform made to create and publish text across the internet. Typeshare has made over $1m in revenue since it was started in 2021, with over 80,000 user, currently $34k MRR I’m speaking to Sam to find out how he started Typeshare as the first of 12 startups he was planning to build, and what made this stick. 00:00 Intro 01:10 Sam's entrepreneurial background 02:03 Failed past projects 03:31 12 startups in 12 months 04:16 The idea for Typeshare...
Mar 05, 2025•15 min•Ep. 125
Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email tool he launched in 2017. Justin was last on the podcast 2 years ago when he’d hit $15k MRR and just left his role at Stripe to focus on Buttondown. I was struck by Justin’s well thought through approach to building. He makes calculated risks and shares a lot of his learnings on his blog, Applied Cartography (which is an essential read for any indie hackers). This episode I catch up with Justin to hear how he’s grown the team to 8 people a...
Feb 07, 2025•17 min•Ep. 124
Today I’m not actually joined by an indie hacker, but by someone who can help a lot of indies out there. Josh Peleg is the Head of Biz Dev and Mergers and Acquisitions at BlueThrone. Essentially, he knows all about how to sell a business from the buyer's side. In this episode we’re going to learn from Josh exactly what you need to know about selling your indie product. How you find an acquirer, what does the process look like and how you can get a deal over the line. I’ve spoken to some indie ha...
Jan 22, 2025•15 min•Ep. 123
Arvid Kahl is returning to the podcast for the third time. In 2019, he’d just sold Feedback Panda for a life changing amount of money and then wrote the book Zero to Sold. In 2023, he was in full-on creator mode with The Bootstrapped Founder and had just released The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now, he’s still producing the content but is also spending time on his SaaS Podscan, which is an extremely ambitious tool that transcribes every podcast and let’s you track mentions of your brand. Timestamps 0...
Jan 15, 2025•17 min•Ep. 122
Recently I’ve been reviewing my catalogue of previous guests and have been intrigued to see where they are now, so expect to see a few more returning guests over the next few weeks. Today is a chap who was last on the podcast 3 years ago, and is still ever present in the indie community. Pete Codes is writes the High Signal newsletter, sharing all the best indie hacking news every week. He’s making his main living through Ghostwriting for Twitter , Bluesky and LinkedIn , but he’s still launching...
Jan 08, 2025•14 min•Ep. 121
Tiago Ferreira is the co-founder of Podsqueeze , an AI podcast tool that helps automate your podcast content. The tool, that helps you create show notes, newsletters, social posts and more, is currently doing $16k MRR and growing. You might also know Tiago from his podcast Wannabe Entrepreneur , where he’s interviewed impressive founders including Pieter Levels. Timestamps 00:00 - Intro 120 - Tiago Ferreira 01:06 - Tiago's background 02:25 - Lessons from failures 03:40 - Starting Podsqueeze - so...
Sep 13, 2024•16 min•Ep. 120
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 Ji...
Aug 23, 2024•17 min•Ep. 119
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...
Aug 09, 2024•16 min•Ep. 118
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 00:00 Intro 02:58 How Kyle learned SEO 04:31 Being Scientific with SEO 05:47 Why you should try paid ads 07:17 Ranking top of Google with Lorem I...
Jun 14, 2024•15 min•Ep. 117
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 00:00 Intro 00:56 Email Octopus Sponsor 02:30 Page Flows Acquisition 05:03 What did Ramy buy after he sold his company 05:56 Starting Hovercode 08:05 Finding new business ideas 09:32 Growth for Hovercode 11:22 Working with a horizontal product 12:20 The perfect indie business 14...
May 31, 2024•16 min•Ep. 116
Tibo Louis-Lucas is a serial founder, most well known for starting Tweet Hunter and Taplio in 2021, before selling the company in 2022 for 8 figures. Since then, Tibo has gone on to acquire an AI video creation tool, Typeframes, which he spun Revid.ai recently. He actually announced after recording this that he has left Tweethunter and is back to focusing on his early stage products, which we touch on in this episode. He’s also started a newsletter with over 50k subscribers and has over 115k Twi...
May 16, 2024•17 min•Ep. 115
Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid, a Maid Service software that has just hit $200k MRR. Amar is a seasoned bootstrapped entrepreneur, having started ZenMaid back in 2013. Amar’s story shows the power of sticking with something through the hard times, and having an unsexy niche (aka not selling to other indie hackers) can lead to a phenomenal indie business. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:53 Scaling in the first 2 years 04:38 Growing an indie business in a price sensitive niche 06:54 Travelling whi...
May 10, 2024•17 min•Ep. 114
Matt Medeiros is the founder of WP Minute , a weekly podcast highlighting WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. He’s a podcasting expert, having previously worked as Director of Podcasting success at Castos and now hosts & produces Breakdown, a podcast by Gravity forms. This episode talks about how you can make a sustainable 5-figure side project, with a niche audience while working a full time job and increasing your opportunities as you do it. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:32 From the family ...
Apr 25, 2024•16 min•Ep. 113
Manu Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter he bootstrapped to $700k. In 2023, he acquired 2 newsletters to bring the subscriber count to 100k and raised a small 250k funding round to help boost growth.
Apr 10, 2024•16 min•Ep. 112
Max Haining is the founder of 100DaysofNoCode and 100DaysofAI , which are bootcamps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills. Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100DaysofNoCode as a challenge for himself to learn NoCode tools during covid, but as more people joined in, he realised he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform which he’s now working on full time. Follow Max: Twitter Timestamps 00:00 - Intro 01:28 - Max early life 03:31 - University stud...
Apr 03, 2024•16 min•Ep. 111
Max Serrano is the founder of IGotAnOffer , a bootstrapped coaching platform focused on helping people get jobs and progress their career. Initially starting out in consulting, Max started IGotAnOffer on the side, creating digital products to help people land consulting jobs, but pivoted to coaching after they lost 70% of their revenue in the tech hiring freeze, having to lay off the majority of his staff. Now, with a profit first mentality, they are on a growth trajectory again. Timestamps 00:0...
Mar 27, 2024•16 min•Ep. 110
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 ...
Jan 24, 2024•17 min•Ep. 109
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 00:00 108 - Kieran Ball 02:07 Failing to learn how to code 03:05 H...
Jan 11, 2024•17 min•Ep. 108
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 foun...
Jan 03, 2024•17 min•Ep. 107
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 Sequoi a. 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 ...
Dec 27, 2023•14 min•Ep. 106
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 ...
Dec 20, 2023•16 min•Ep. 105
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 00:00 Intro 01:30 Starting Mealime 07:07 Pivot to mobile and reducing prices 08:36 Mealime Gr...
Dec 13, 2023•17 min•Ep. 104
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 committ...
Dec 06, 2023•17 min•Ep. 103
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. In this episode we talk about life as a creator and solopreneur, how Arvid is scratching his SaaS ...
Nov 29, 2023•17 min•Ep. 102
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 00:00 Intro 01:21 Harvey's life before Growform 01:35 Side projects as a 17 yr old 04:10 Getting a law degree 05:04 The idea for Growform 06:42 Benefits of picking a niche 09:12 Growth tactics 10:06...
Nov 22, 2023•16 min•Ep. 101
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 00:00 - Intro 01:40 - The impact Ramen Club has on other ...
Nov 15, 2023•16 min•Ep. 100
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 lon...
Nov 08, 2023•17 min•Ep. 99
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 conversati...
Nov 01, 2023•16 min•Ep. 98
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...
Oct 13, 2023•17 min•Ep. 97
