Indie Bites

Elston Baretto was last on the pod in March 2021 , when he’d just grown his tool, Tiiny.host , to $600 MRR and we recorded as part of my mission to share stories of unknown indie hackers with potential. Fast forward 2 years and Tiiny Host has grown to $10k MRR and Elston has just quit his job to become a full time indie hacker. 👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co . Topics covered: Hitting $10k...

Patrick Posner is the creator of a portfolio of Wordpress plugins which have been downloaded almost a million times collectively making him $12k p/m. Patrick went full time indie in 2020 and since then has both grown quickly and scaled back operations to build the best sort of life for him. I love these types of stories of relatively unknown indie hackers who are creating the dream life for themse...

Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect , a note taking app which he’s grown to $20k MRR with a team of 4. Previously, he was the co-founder of Clearbit , a VC-backed company that scaled to $50m in revenue. After stepping down as CEO of Clearbit, he decided to focus on doing the stuff he enjoys. So he’s sailing around the world building an app that gets him excited every day. 👉 My side project, Whi...

Craig Hewitt is the Founder and CEO of Castos , a bootstrapped podcast hosting and analytics platform with a services arm for podcast production. He’s been in podcasting almost a decade, having started his own show, Rogue Startups and his production service Podcast Motor (which he folded into Castos). Craig not only shares his ponderings on his show, but he also writes a weekly newsletter called F...

Today I’m joined by Dan Fayle, who is the co-founder of Chekkit , a company that’s he bootstrapped to almost $2.5m ARR and 20 employees. There’s a few interesting things about Dan’s story I know you’re going to like. This is his first company and he quit his job to go all-in with 3 co-founders, he got his early customers through, and I’m not kidding, door to door sales and finally he’s not changed...

Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs, one of the biggest and best SEO tools on the internet. Ahrefs are one of the clear success stories as a bootstrapped company, growing to be a an 8 figure brand over the past decade. Things really took off when Tim took over marketing for the company back in 2015, first focusing on growing the blog, before experimenting with different marketing channel to bring Ahref...

Today I’m joined by Jared Maddern, the founder of Beamhouse Leather , a leather supply business he’s grown to £45k in sales in the past 2 years. Some of you might know I run a handmade leather wallet business on the side, called Whitstable Craft Co , and so this is a little look into the other part of my life. Although Jared doesn’t run an indie SaaS, I wanted to bring slightly different perspecti...

Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop , a product that helps newsletter operators grow through referral partnerships. Indie hackers might know Louis from his Sales for Founders course which he ran a few years ago, as well as his many other projects. What we covered in this episode: How Sparkloop Started How Louis met his cofounder Manuel Going Niche vs Broad Pursuing a growing market What...

Kyle Gawley is the founder of Gravity , which he’s bootstrapped to over $25k p/m. In 2012, he scaled a vc-backed company, called Get Invited, to $5m in sales, before a near-death experience made him rethink how he lived his life. Now, Kyle is travelling the world building his bootstrapped SaaS. Let’s find out how he did it. Join the Indie Bites membership 👈 What we covered in this episode Startin...

Sam King is the founder of Flick, a tool for managing and growing your social media, doing over $3.5m ARR fully bootstrapped. Sam has taken a unique path into bootstrapping, first being a YouTuber, then running an agency before flipping it into a SaaS with Flick. There is an hour long extended version of this show available on the Indie Bites membership, head to indiebites.com/membership to sub. W...

Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio , a SaaS business that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses, co-host of the fantastic podcast Software Social and author of the book Deploy Empathy , which is all about how to do great customer interviews. We cover a lot of ground in this short episode, including how to write a book, building in public and mental health as a founder. Along...

Macgill Davis and Will Goto are the founders of Rize , a time-tracking platform that helps you increase your productivity, started in August 2020. Will and Macgill met at a company called Peer, which then got acquired by Twitter, they then left Twitter and founded a company called Humble Dot, which they raised for but unfortunately had to shut down. Join the membership for extended conversations...

Milly Tamati is not your usual founder. She lives on an remote island off Scotland with a population of just 170 people, previously co-owned a hostel in Thailand, co-founded a wine-tour in Australia and founded an illustration-agency in the UK. Now she’s working on a community called generalist.world , where’s she’s helping generalists like us indie hackers, find like minded individuals and jobs t...

Today I’m joined by Dominik Sobe, the founder of Helpkit , a product he started last year that turns Notion pages into a professional help center, doing $4.5k MRR. In this episode we talk about Dom’s many failed projects, how he finally found something that worked with Helpkit and how he went from wanting to be a management consultant to being an indie hacker. What we covered in this episode: Dom’...

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...

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 Goi...

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 prob...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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 discuss...

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 w...

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, produc...

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...