Ed chats with Pierre de Wulf, co-founder of ScrapingBee. Pierre tells us about the time his company almost got acquired - and how the deal fell apart at the final stage.

Links:

• Pierre's company, Scraping Bee.
• Pierre on Twitter

My co-host Ed Freyfogle chats with Brian Sierakowski, general manager of Baremetrics. Brian stepped in to manage Baremetrics after it was acquired a year or so ago from the founder.

Ed and Brian discuss the challenges of taking over a complicated business,  Brian's trajectory from SaaS founder himself to running someone else's business, and how changing prices inadvertently gave him the chance to get valuable customer feedback.

Ed and Steve talk about a dilemma Steve is facing. An open source component heavily used by Feature Upvote has become abandoned by the maintainer, and Steve has to make a hard decision about how to deal with this.

We also talk about why and how Steve recently moved Feature Upvote's website from Jekyll to Wordpress. Yes, really, Wordpress.

Ed chats with John Ndege, a former bootstrapper, about how it feels no longer being one's own boss. 

John launched and grew a product, and he ultimately sold it. Afterwards, he went back to being an employee, working for a large corporation. Ed and John discuss the advantages and frustrations you might experience when you choose the path of going back to work for someone else.

Links:

• John's website: https://www.johnndege.com/
• John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnndege

Ed and I chat about Ed's recent trip to London, my upcoming trip to London, the return of in-person events, and getting exposed to ideas and concepts outside of our normal channels.

We mentioned Geomob and Business of Software.

In or near London? And interested in joining me for a Bootstrapped mini-meetup in central London on the evening of April 6th or 7th? Let me know at [email protected]

I talk with Brian Casel, founder of ZipMessage, an asynchronous video messaging tool.

Brian has created several successful products in the past, and sometimes ran them in parallel. But he recently sold his entire portfolio of products to focus on ZipMessage. Brian explains why he made this decision.  He also talks about why sometimes you need to shut something down, even if it does seem to be kind of, sort of working.

And we talk about the feeling when you realise that a new product is really getting traction.

Links:

• zipmessage.com
• Brian's podcast, Bootstrapped Web
• Brian on Twitter

Ed tells me why and how he obtained a trademark for his business. We discuss when it is worthwhile to do this. We then talk about the trouble with having competitors clone your product or website content.

Ed mentioned how we got the EU to refund most of the costs of obtaining a trademark. Learn about the EU's "Ideas Powered for business SME Fund" here.

I chat with Robert Brandl, founder of ToolTester.com. We talk about Robert's recent experience changing the domain name of his website. It was an expensive experience, and one that, for a while, did not go to plan.

Ed and I chat about my recent experience hiring a marketing manager for Feature Upvote. Amongst other topics, we discuss how I went about finding the right person.   

Ed  interviews Charles Perry, founder of RelaNet. Charles was the co-host of Release Notes, a long-running podcast that Charles and his co-host recently ended.

It's a great conversation, addressing how, over the years, we change, our industries change, and how sometimes things do come to an end.

• Charles on Twitter
• The Release Notes podcast's back catalog of 450 episodes