Indie Bites

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder of Acquire , previously known as MicroAcquire, the largest startup acquisition marketplace. I’ve spoken to many indie hackers about selling their businesses, many of whom have done so using Andrew’s platform. Before starting the Acquire, Andrew spent 8 years bootstrapping Bizness Apps to $10m ARR before being acquired by a private equity firm. You might also know of...

Today I’m talking with Flo Schirmer about "sweaty startups", a term for old-fashioned, low-risk businesses that are often service based and unsexy. I’m talking window cleaning, car washing, self-storage, house moving and more. We’re going to discuss if you can do this as a side hustle, if you should do this over a regular software business, and what you need to do to get started with some ideas al...

Marie Martens is the co-founder of Tally , a form builder she started with her partner Filip, now used by half a million people and are over $150k MRR. Marie was on the pod 3 years ago when they’d scaled to 16,000 users and $8k MRR in 1 year. In that episode we discussed the origin story, getting their first 100 users and how they’d grown so quickly. Today, we’re going to be finding out how they’v...

Tom Fishburne is the founder of Marketoonist , a bootstrapped marketing cartoon business he started in 2010. He started drawing and sharing cartoons in 2002, and it took him 8 years to make the leap, despite having a successful career in marketing. 15 years later, Tom is still going strong, with the business making money from cartoon licensing, speaking gigs, brand deals, his book and more. Listen...

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). Tod...

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 entrepreneuri...

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 a...

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, wh...

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 am...

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 makin...

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 - Tiag...

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 produc...

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...

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...

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...

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 touc...

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...

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 ti...

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.

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 fu...

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 h...

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 dec...

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 serve...

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, o...

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 intervi...