Make Lemonade

Today we’re joined by Tibo Louis-Lucas , who is 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, and Feather.so, a Notion blogging platform. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:17 Leaving Lempire and starting from scratch 03:00 Learning from fa...

Today we’re doing a a behind the scenes episode with JR. We haven’t looked at what’s going on since December, so it’s about time I posed some questions to JR about everything from features to growth and more. Links John O'Nolan episode: https://youtu.be/QXwiTZiO46g Simon Pittman episode: https://youtu.be/L11ii1qKD5o Rob Walling episode: https://youtu.be/M_JbjtIYUh0 JR's features tweet: https://x.c...

Today we're joined by one of the most successful sellers on Lemon Squeezy, Adam Pietrasiak . Adam is the founder of Screen Studio , a beautiful tool for creating and editing screen recordings that he started at the end of 2022 and now has thousands of paying users. In this episode we talk about how Adam made $30k in his first month, his approach to creating a well-polished product, and why he's no...

John O’Nolan is the founder of Ghost , an independent publishing platform. John sees Ghost as an experiment in doing the opposite of what every other tech company does. They haven’t raised VC, instead setting Ghost up as a non-profit that can never be bought or sold. The core product is open source, with a simple SaaS model to fund future development. John is opinionated and outspoken but with man...

Justin is the co-founder of Transistor.fm , a podcast hosting platform that hosts over 27,000 podcasts. Justin has bootstrapped the business since 2018 and has used it to build a better life for himself and his employees. Justin was on the pod back in January and we ended feeling like there was left with lots more to discuss, particularly Justin’s thoughts on building a Calm Company and what he pl...

Simon is the founder of Better Creating, a business he started in 2020 geared towards simplifying productivity and finding the best ideas tools and tech to help people create the life they want. His YouTube channel has over 130,000 subscribers, where he makes tutorials, tech reviews and more. Simon is another creator who has gone deep on Notion, building a second brain and many other systems that...

On the 6th March 2024, Aaron Francis was part of layoffs at Planet Scale , where he was an educator. Since then, Aaron has had a hard decision to make: find another job, or take the leap to full-time entrepreneur. Now the job offers came in thick and fast for Aaron, with almost 600,000 people seeing his layoff tweet, but after documenting his thoughts on his own podcast, Mostly Technical, Aaron an...

Jack McDade is the creator of Statamic, a content management system for Laravel. He’s just launched his new course, Radical Design, which teaches people Jack’s unique approach to design and building products. And when unique approach, I mean it. All you have to do it scroll through Jack’s sites, his personal, Statamic, the Radical Design landing page to be immediately entertained by the little nug...

Today we're joined by Sara Loretta, who is the 10th US Certified Notion Consultant and Founder of SYSTMS™ , an operations agency for agencies and small startups. She previously owned a design studio, 99 & Saint Claire, and spent nearly a decade before that in the nonprofit sector working in business development. Follow Sara: Website YouTube Twitter Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:43 How Sara Discovered...

Today we’re back with an episode of our Project 100k series, which is all about my journey as a creator going from 0-$100k selling through Lemon Squeezy. I’ve been a podcast producer for years but would like to stop trading my time for money and find a way to build an asset that makes me money while I sleep. In this episode we give our first update on the progress I’ve made on the name, positionin...

Today we're bringing you a special instalment of the Lemonhead series, getting to know our co-founder and CEO, JR Farr. We talk about how JR left college to pursue the "internet thing" before starting what would become the world's largest Wordpress marketplace, Mojo. In 2012, Mojo was acquired by Endurance (owns brands such as Bluehost and Hostgator) and JR went from founder to executive on a lead...

Today we’re joined by Guillermo Rauch , CEO of Vercel . A cloud platform that has built pioneering technology, including the Next.js framework for React. Their most recent funding round was a $150m Series D at a whopping $2.5b valuation back in 2021, to give you a sense of the size of the company. This is an exciting episode, as it comes shortly after Guillermo announced that Vercel are partnering...

Today we’re joined by Rob Hope , the founder of One Page Love and host of the Yo! podcast. He also has an upcoming course, Show Them . Rob has been hustling away for almost 15 years on One Page Love, sharing the best single page websites on the internet. The Yo! podcast is a phenomenal showcase of the most talented designers and makers, packaged up into a top class production. Timestamps 00:00 Int...

Today we’re joined by Jay Clouse , founder of Creator Science , which is a platform with a membership, community, courses, a podcast, newsletter and more. Jay has scaled his media business to over $50k a month, while studying the best creators in the business. Creator Science was born out of a newsletter Jay started in 2017 which has grown to over 50k subs, then a podcast in 2019 which has million...

Today we’re launching a new series we’re calling Project 100k, which is all about my journey as a creator going from 0-$100k selling through Lemon Squeezy. I’ve been a podcast producer for years but would like to stop trading my time for money and find a way to build an asset that makes me money while I sleep. In this episode, JR turns coach as we brainstorm ideas and come up with a new direction...

Today we’re joined by Justin Jackson , co-founder of Transistor.fm , a podcast hosting platform that hosts over 27,000 podcasts. Justin has bootstrapped the business since 2018 and has used it to build a better life for himself and his employees. In this episode we discuss if video is essential for podcasts in 2024, is YouTube going to kill off the audio podcast? And we also touch on how Justin is...

We’re back with the first recording of 2024 and so we thought we’d take a look back through 2023, some of the key moments for Lemon Squeezy and the team, then we’ll round off looking to whats coming up this year. 00:00 Intro 00:34 Christmas break catchup 03:18 Looking back on key events in 2023 11:13 Reflection on not raising 13:29 Some of the key features launched in 2023 18:57 Thoughts on the po...

Today we’re joined by Matt Paulson, who is the founder and CEO of MarketBeat, a financial media company with their main newsletter, MarketBeat Daily being sent out to over 4m subscribers. They do over $25m in revenue and has over 15 employees and have seen rapid growth over the past few years. JR and I speak to Matt about his origin story, how COVID almost 4x’d the business, Matt’s advice to peopl...

Today we’re joined by Rob Walling , an 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 690 episodes having started in 2010. He’s also written 4 books, Start Small Stay Small, Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Shit Toget...

Today we’re joined by Jason Cohen . He’s most well known for being the co-founder of WP Engine . You might also know Jason as @asmartbear on Twitter and from his popular blog with the same name, started almost 2 decades ago. Jason is a 2 times unicorn founder so has some incredible startup wisdom at all stages of growth. This is a wide ranging conversation where we talk about Jason’s day to day li...

In this episode, we’re going to have a good old catch up about the state of play at Lemon Squeezy. How the most recent Black Friday period has been, what new features have been released recently, how the team growth is going and some of the new features in the works (including building a marketplace from scratch). Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:45 Not meeting your cofounders 07:13 Black Friday / Cyber...

In this episode James and JR address mental health challenges within startups, which can put a particular amount of stress on founders and employees. This episode is particularly poignant because the recording day marked the anniversary of the death of JR’s friend from mental health. We discuss how we've both had our own run-ins with depression and anxiety, what we've done to overcome it and how J...

Today we’re joined by our first guest of the series, Aaron Francis , who is currently an Educator at Planet Scale, but you would have seen him all around the internet doing courses, YouTube videos, podcasts and more. In this episode we discuss the creation and launch of Screencasting.com , a course Aaron made teaching you how to make better screencasts. We go into detail on how to structure the co...

In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things shipping at Lemon Squeezy. Why they ship fast without breaking things, Simple Loveable Complete Products rather than MVPs and everything involved in the process. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:56 Why shipping fast is important 04:10 Does shipping too fast and consistently lead to bloat 06:27 How we ship at Lemon Squeezy 11:50 Sprint cycles 13:25 50%...

Now, if you knew you were going to sign a piece of paper that was going to make your company worth $50m, would you turn it down and walk away? Well, that’s exactly what has happened with JR and the Lemon Squeezy team, and is why we’ve had a brief break from the pod. But we’re back, and JR is ready to share all. We’ve lined up a cracking few episodes for this series of the show, including talking a...