Indie Bites

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...

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 fo...

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...

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 Transisto...

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, in...

I've never really understood mental health, or those who have had these challenges in the past. So when I've had my own challenges, I've struggled to comprehend what has been happening to me. This episode is hopefully an interesting insight into how I've been feeling over the past few months to hopefully help others who might be going through a similar thing. Here's some things I talk about: Where...

Today I'm joined by Danny Miranda , who is the host of The Danny Miranda podcast , which has rapidly grown to over 50,000 downloads in less than 6 months. He publishes 3x a week and has had some awesome guests including Harry Dry, Gary Vee and David Perell. Danny is a walking case study of shooting your shot, making your own luck and having laser focus on one single thing. But this episode isn't g...

Derrick Reimer is the founder of SavvyCal , a new approach to calendar scheduling and has grown to multiple thousands MRR since he launched it earlier in 2020. Derrick also co-founded Drip with Rob Walling in 2012, which was acquired by Leadpages in 2016. You might have heard Derrick on the Art of Product podcast with Tuple co-founder Ben Orenstein where they document their journey building their...

Natalie Nagele is the co-founder of Wildbit, the company behind Postmark, Beanstalk, People-First Jobs and more. Wildbit has just turned 20 years old, so Natalie knows exactly what it takes to grow and scale successful bootstrapped businesses. What makes Natalie so interesting to me is that she’s in the group of seriously successful indie hackers (over 100k customers, around for 20 years, pretty l...

Elston Baretto is the founder of Tiiny.host and is in a similar position to most indie hackers - working on his side-project alongside a full time job, but has had a career packed with learnings that we're going to talk through in this episode. Elston started out his career at JP Morgan, having reluctantly accepted a graduate job he planned to stay at for 6 months. 4 years later, he was still at t...

Marie Poulin is the host of Notion Office Hours , creator of Notion Mastery , Run Your Learning Launch, Digital Strategy School , Think Like a Digital Strategist , and co-founded Oki Doki with her husband, where they help folks create, launch, and market online courses and training programs. What we covered in this episode: What is Notion Mastery and why did Marie start it? The impact YouTube had...

Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running...

Today we're joined by Philip Kiely, who is currently Head of Marketing at Gumroad. Philip also launched " Writing for Software Developers " last May, making $20,000 in sales in its first week without any pre-existing audience. Since then, Philip has been on a mission to help as many software developers as possible realize that they possess the skills they need to become great writers. What we cove...

Dan, like many other indie hackers, runs a bunch of projects alongside a full-time job which all compound to him making over $5k a month. In 2012 he started Magpile , a free online resource about magazines, which was followed by Subsail , a platform to help indie publishers sell magazine subscriptions. Earlier this year Dan started using the publishing platform Ghost, which he then started to buil...

Dianna Allen is the founder of TERRA, a DTC candle brand, where she designs and hand pours a variety of candles. In October 2020, Dianna left her life as a freelancer behind to put her efforts into TERRA full-time, which as we all know, is a huge leap to make. What we covered: Should more indie hackers work on physical products? What happened with Budget Meal Planner? Should more indie hackers kil...

Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. They interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started their business and how they grew it, including revenue figures for every business they interview. But in this episode, we’re going to be discussing the new SEO course that Pat launched this week, making over $20k in pre-sales....

Today I’m joined by Rob Hope, who is a South African designer, developer and the host of one of my favorite podcasts out there for entrepreneurs Yo!. He's also the founder of One Page Love, Email Love, and has recently released an ebook with a hundred landing page tips. It's safe to say Rob knows his stuff. When it comes to building landing pages, having started One Page Love back in 2008. What we...

Mark Asquith (aka That British Podcast Guy) is the CEO of Rebel Base Media, the U.K. podcast tech company that makes Captivate.fm and so much more. What we discussed in this episode: What makes podcasting such a good medium Is the amount of investment in podcasting (from the likes of Spotify) a good thing? Is podcasting oversaturated? What does it take to grow a podcast? How to stay consistent wit...

Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers. Ramy started Page Flows after building a UI newsletter to thousands of subscribers, trying to improve his own skills as a developer who cares about design. Ramy is now a full-time indie hacker, with Page Flows making enough revenue to sustain him, alongside a few other side projects. What we discusse...

Nick Fogle is the co-founder of Wavve and ChurnKey, but there is a lot more to Nick than just that. Wavve is an audio to video platform which has now hit $1.5m in ARR, but Nick has only left his full time job 3 years after starting the company and 9 months after it had eclipsed his salary. Why? Well, Nick had $250,000 student loans to pay off . What we covered in this episode: How Nick got into $2...

Wilhelm Klopp is the founder of Simple Poll, a super simple (but powerful) poll Slack app that has over 600k active users. Wil now works on Simple Poll full time having left his job at GitHub in September 2019 (1 year ago 🎉). What we discussed in this episode: Hows the year been after leaving GitHub What is Simple Poll How Wil came up with the idea How he grew the app to 600k users What he did to...

Mubashar 'Mubs' Iqbal is a prolific maker who has started over 90 projects. Currently Mubs is building Founderpath with Nathan Latka, and on One Hour SaaS where he spends one hour every day working on SaaS businesses. In this episode we talked about: How Mubs got into starting side-projects How he comes up with ideas and decides what to work on Why some of his projects run on auto-pilot How much i...

Rosie Sherry is a community builder, indie hacker and founder. She currently runs the Indie Hackers community and also a weekly newsletter where she talks about building communities. Previously, Rosie founded Ministry of Testing. In this episode we talked about: Rosie's background as an indie hacker Going full time on Ministry of Testing, growing that into a £1m+ business What it's like running th...

Corey Haines is the founder of Swipe Files, he also runs refactoring growth, mental models for marketing, hey marketers and he was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics. I've been a follower of Corey for a while and impressed by the level and consistency of everything he produces. In this episode we talked about: What projects Corey is currently working on Why he left Baremetrics What it's...

Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder and CEO of VEED - an online video editing platform. VEED is a fully-fledged collaborative video editing product used by many influencers, coaches and businesses for adding subtitles , captions , text , merging videos , making meme videos , turning podcasts to videos and much more. What we covered in this episode: On Veed What is Veed? Where did you come up with the...