Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad, a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, Matt has been on quite the journey with Astropad and we’re going to dive into all of that today, along with a mini-masterclass on PR.

What we covered in this episode:

• Origins of Astropad
• Having two technical co-founders
• How they tackled marketing with no prior knowledge
• Most useful books to learn the basics
  • 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  • Burned Out Blogger's Guide to PR
• How Matt leveraged PR in the early days
• How indie hackers can use PR for their projects
• Size of Astropad in 2022
• Why they built a hardware product
• How to get into building hardware
• The benefits of hardware products
• How Apple stole their product
• How they saved their business after being crushed by Apple

Recommendations

• Book: Radical Candour, The Making of a Manager
• Podcast: Dithering
• Indie Hacker: Monica Lent

Follow Matt

• Twitter
• Astropad Podcast

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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