hexdevs

Episode Notes
Sign up for the hexdevs newsletter

Monica Lent is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She started coding before the age of ten, and haven’t stopped since. After working for more than 10 years in the tech industry as an engineer, tech lead and manager, she decided to quit her job and bootstrap a SaaS company full-time.

Show Notes & Transcription

Brian David Hall is an expert in conversion optimization. He's a software engineer by training, runs his own company, and is the host of the SaaS Experiments Podcast, where he talks to other experts in growth marketing. We talked about the unusual tech jobs he's had that helped him learn other skills beyond coding.

You can use your skills in other areas like Marketing and Sales to transition to a tech job instead of throwing away your current expertise. Learning how to code on top of your existing skills will give you superpowers!

If you want to transition into a tech job, you can start by solving problems for your current company. By doing this, you'll build a portfolio, get real-world experience, stand out from other candidates that only know how to code but have no experience in other areas.

You can also look for a "weird tech job", which is a job that involves coding but is not a developer role at a tech company.

You can find the coupon to Brian's new e-book on the Show Notes (link below) plus some highlights and transcripts!

Show Notes and Transcript

Michael Lynch is a software developer and blogger. He used to work as a software engineer at Google, but he decided to quit and now he's a solo founder, and blogs about his experience.

He's recently launched the course Hit the Front Page of Hacker News. The course teaches everything he has learned about Hacker News after getting many of his original blog posts to hit the front page. It covers the site's unique culture, how to choose topics, improve your writing, and what to do if your submission fails.

We also talked about going solo founder, and his financial independence journey. 

Highlights

00:00 Intro
00:41 Who is Michael Lynch?
01:58 Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
03:04 Courses vs e-books
04:00 How many copies were sold
05:04 Beta-testing the course before launch day
07:19 Financial Independence and becoming an entrepreneur
08:16 Financial Independence and travelling
09:16 The shock of going back to a normal job
11:08 Planning for Financial Independence by building a business
12:37 Mr. Money Mustache, the 4% rule and Early Retirement
14:16 How much you make vs How much you save
14:33 What does he want to do when he retires early?
15:12 Life expenses and business expenses
15:49 Negotiating a big salary at Google by getting multiple job offers
18:30 Financial choices in your 20's and the optimum strategy
23:05 A good salary for boring work isn't fun
25:56 Bootstrapping is very different than the startup life
26:48 Having freedom and control over the direction of your product/business
28:40 Prioritizing and evaluating business ideas
31:05 How to do market research
32:57 Lessons after quitting Google: content strategy, marketing, and distribution
36:59 Keep yourself motivated and don't put too much pressure on yourself
39:49 Advice to anyone who wants to quit their job and start a business
42:36 Final remarks

Links from this episode

Show Notes
Hit The Front Page of Hacker News Course
Michael Lynch's Site
Michael Lynch's Twitter
Sign up for our newsletter to get the Highlights from our episodes

Listen to this episode to learn how Preetam Nath and Sankalp Jonna, co-founders of SuperLemon and DelightChat, started and grew a Shopify micro-SaaS to $30,000 monthly recurring revenue and more than 20,000 users.

They did all of that by themselves, the team was just Preetam and Sankalp, and Sankalp was the only engineer. As they say on their website, they are "A small team with a big heart".

SuperLemon is a WhatsApp plugin for Shopify stores serving over 20k users with 1.5k paying customers. It recently crossed 30k dollars in MRR, and all of this growth happened in about 14 months.

They are now building DelightChat, a customer support tool for small and medium-sized direct-to-consumer & e-commerce brands running lean teams, and recently started hiring and growing the team.

Highlights:

• How they did market research before writing any line of code and how being a little "impatient" with growth is a good thing for a founder
• How they scaled the app to 20k users with a team of 2 people (1 engineer) by using the Keep It Simple Silly (KISS) principle
• How distribution is the most important thing for a micro-SaaS and why they decided to target the Shopify marketplace
• How they prioritize features and make their customers happy while having a very lean team
• How to acquire customers every day for the next year
• Why you should build a business that allows you to have freedom and live a good life
• We also asked them if they ever received an offer to be acquired or to get VC funding

Links:

• DelightChat
• SuperLemon
• MicroSaaS Guide
• Preetam Nath's Twitter
• Sankalp Jonna's Twitter
• Sankalp's engineering blog
• Notes and Transcript