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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Harry Morton is the founder of Lower Street Media , a podcast production agency that specialises in premium podcasts for ambitious companies. Lower Street are the agency behind top shows such as Secret Leaders , Technology Untangled and WFH Daily . Harry's business has skyrocketed since COVID, doubling in size of revenue and headcount in the last 6-months as more companies start to realise how effective podcasting can be. Harry also runs Single Track Conf , a 3-day mountain-biking founder retrea...
Oct 31, 2021•17 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics , started with Paul Jarvis in 2019. Jack handles the technical side of the business, but isn't afraid to get on the mic on their podcast, Above Board, or send out some spicy tweets. Jack also runs the Serverless Laravel course , which he launched back in 2020. After this conversation Jack has turned into a true friend, speaking with me for several hours after, a genuinely nice chap. You’re going to want the same thing after listening to this pod. ...
Oct 28, 2021•15 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast Pete runs No CS Degree , among other things, sharing stories of people who have made it as a developer, without going down the traditional route of getting a computer science degree, showing how it's possible to earn a nice salary without going to university. He has also started High Signal , a community for revenue verified entrepreneurs, a site for finding fully remote companies (sold) and finally made 2 courses where you'll learn how to both monetize and grow your newsletter . ➡️ Here's my co...
Oct 20, 2021•16 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast Mike Slaats is the founder of Upvoty, an instant feedback software which has recently hit $17k MRR. Mike also runs the SaaS pirates community, where he talks all about running a SaaS company. Previously, he scaled Vindy, an only marketplace for home development to 1m ARR in 5 years. What we covered in this episode Why did you start Upvoty? Stopping a $1m business to start from scratch Why your work should be fulfilling Should you be passionate about your audience? How to validate your idea How M...
Oct 13, 2021•16 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast Noah Bragg is an indie hacker in its truest form. Building in public hacking away on his project, Potion , which is a a way to host your Notion pages as websites behind a custom domain. He's also the co-host of the Product Journey podcast , where he speaks with his co-host Ben about their progress on their respective side projects. What we covered: The goal of building a huge business Project: Coffee Pass When to decide to stop a project Failing after 2 years working on something First project a...
Sep 29, 2021•15 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast Andy Cloke is the founder of Data Fetcher , a platform for running API requests in Airtable, which is currently doing around $3k MRR. Andy has started many projects in the past, his most recent one, Influence Grid, was sold for $55k back in mid-2020, having only started it 7 months before. In this episode we talk about his framework for finding trending ideas, building a product and being successful with marketing as a developer. We also talk about the process of selling your product and how to ...
Sep 22, 2021•17 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast Baird is a 4x SaaS founder based in Charleston, SC. His background is in sales, marketing, and support. He bootstrapped and grew two SaaS companies to over $1M in ARR. When he isn't working on Churnkey's sales and marketing, he is on the water with his wife and daughter. What we covered in this episode: The big challenges faced when bootstrapping Did Baird always want to bootstrap Why leave a job to start a company Did he ever get funding from utalk How did Waave come about? How to avoid quittin...
Sep 15, 2021•16 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast Blake Emal is the CMO at Copy.ai , but it's not been a traditional route into that role. 8 years ago Blake was living in the South of France and when he moved back to the US, he had no idea what he wanted to do. As he spoke French, he landed a gig in the French team of an SEO firm. This was his first foray into marketing and he didn't intend to stay in marketing. Fast forward 7 years of working for agencies, freelancing and in-house, he stumbled across a little tool called Copy.ai . He was quite...
Sep 10, 2021•15 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to the full conversation here on Stefan's podcast. This is about 17 minutes of a recording with my friend Stefan on his Founder Hot Seat podcast , which is a show that explores the real challenges that founders have in their business and how to overcome them. I've had a ton of messages from people after listening to my previous bonus episode where I explained some of the challenges I've had with mental health over the past few months, and this episode was super helpful for me to navigate ...
Aug 05, 2021•20 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast Justin Jackson is the co-founder of Transistor.fm , a successful bootstrapped podcast hosting company. The journey building Transistor were documented on the Build Your SaaS podcast, which is a must listen. Justin is the founder of the MegaMaker community which he started in 2013, so if you're part of the maker sphere - you'll probably have heard of him. In this episode we cover: What is Transistor and why did they start it Why work in podcast hosting? Was it not already a solved problem? How di...
Jul 25, 2021•16 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Stokes a full stack developer and entrepreneur based in Bristol in the UK, who's started an ice cream business and cookie dough business amongst other things. Ben, like many indie hackers, has a bunch of small side project ideas, but not enough time to do them. So he started Tiny Projects. Tiny Projects documents his progress with these small ideas, launching 6 projects since May last year, including One Item Store, which he sold, and his most recent, Mailoji, which has just crossed $10k in ...
Jun 14, 2021•17 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast 
