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, products and even book he eventually landed on Trends, which didn’t actually make any money for the first few months. But just 6 short months later, he was at over $20k MRR and growing fast.

Now, Dru is working through the challenges of scaling a rapidly growing business and even hiring people to take over that juicy core. The reports. Here's a link to the Indie Hackers episode he did where he talks more about what went into that growth.

What we covered in this episode:

• Hiring for the core competency of the business, the reports
• What Dru’s day-to-day looks like
• Challenges with context switching
• Starting Trends for fun
• The idea behind framework based research
• The first Trends report on cloud kitchens
• How does Dru decide on topics for Trends
• Choosing to persevere with Trends
• Launching a community
• How comfort challenges led to Trends success
• When to stop projects
• What Dru does for fun

Recommendations

• Book: Sapiens, Caste
• Podcast: Founders
• Indie Hacker: Pat Walls

Follow Dru

• Twitter
• Personal site

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.