Tiago Ferreira is the co-founder of Podsqueeze, an AI podcast tool that helps automate your podcast content. The tool, that helps you create show notes, newsletters, social posts and more, is currently doing $16k MRR and growing. You might also know Tiago from his podcast Wannabe Entrepreneur, where he’s interviewed impressive founders including Pieter Levels.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 120 - Tiago Ferreira
• 01:06 - Tiago's background
• 02:25 - Lessons from failures
• 03:40 - Starting Podsqueeze - solving your own problem
• 05:53 - How Podsqueeze had a successful launch
• 06:40 - How to have a successful launch
• 08:10 - Growth tactics for Podsqueeze - SEO
• 13:03 - Future plans and exit
• 14:28 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling
• Podcast: Startups for the Rest of Us
• Indie Hacker: Elston Baretto

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Today I’m joined by Jijo Sunny, who is the co-founder of Buy Me A Coffee, one of the most popular donation and membership platforms on the internet. They’ve processed 10’s of millions for creators and have built a 26 strong team. Since founding Buy Me A Coffee, Jijo has dabbled in all sorts of projects, including a stint in YC with a podcasting app. Now though, Jijo is back building a new product, Voicenotes, a voice driven AI note taking app.

👉 Listen to the full 1 hour conversation with Jijo here: indiebites.com/membership

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:48 Background
• 02:27 Buy Me a Coffee Origin Story
• 03:37 How did Buy Me A Coffee grow
• 05:35 Jijo on multiple products
• 06:35 Making products cheap to run
• 09:21 Starting voicenotes.com
• 14:02 Parting advice
• 15:56 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: Friendly Ambitious Nerd
• Podcast: Dithering
• Indie Hacker: Danny Postma

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Marybeth Alexander is the founder and Chief Executive Owl of KnowledgeOwl, a bootstrapped knowledge base software founded in 2015. Started as an idea within SurveyGizmo, where Marybeth was working at the time, the company has since flourished into a small, profitable, sustainable business ultimately being built to improve the lives of the founders, employees and customers. In this episode we talk about how Marybeth bought the company from her previous employers, how they grew through reviews and why more indie hackers should put customer happiness front and centre.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:26 Founding story of KnowledgeOwl (prev Help Gizmo)
• 06:54 Marketing and Growth
• 08:58 How to have happy customers
• 10:54 KnowledgeOwl's appraoch to product development
• 13:35 How important is the KnowledgeOwl brand
• 15:07 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
• Podcast: Startup to Last
• Indie Hacker/Entrepreneur: Ari Weinzweig - The Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Being a Better Leader

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Kyle Roof is the co-founder of High Voltage SEO, PageOptimizer Pro and Internet Marketing Gold. An agency, software and course business respectively which all focus on mastering SEO. I’ve spoken at length on the podcast before about how SEO can be such an effective tool for indie hackers to use, so Kyle is the perfect guest to talk to today.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:58 How Kyle learned SEO
• 04:31 Being Scientific with SEO
• 05:47 Why you should try paid ads
• 07:17 Ranking top of Google with Lorem Ipsum
• 10:15 Where do people start with SEO
• 12:13 Encouraging word of mouth growth
• 13:56 Recommendations

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Hovercode, a QR code generator he’s working on full time. Previously, Ramy founded Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers that he sold last November.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:56 Email Octopus Sponsor
• 02:30 Page Flows Acquisition
• 05:03 What did Ramy buy after he sold his company
• 05:56 Starting Hovercode
• 08:05 Finding new business ideas
• 09:32 Growth for Hovercode
• 11:22 Working with a horizontal product
• 12:20 The perfect indie business
• 14:48 Ramy's future

Recommendations

• Book: The Mom Test
• Podcast: Hidden Brain
• Indie Hacker: Laura Roeder, Amar Ghose

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Tibo Louis-Lucas is a serial founder, most well known for starting Tweet Hunter and Taplio in 2021, before selling the company in 2022 for 8 figures. Since then, Tibo has gone on to acquire an AI video creation tool, Typeframes, which he spun Revid.ai recently. He actually announced after recording this that he has left Tweethunter and is back to focusing on his early stage products, which we touch on in this episode. He’s also started a newsletter with over 50k subscribers and has over 115k Twitter followers. Tibo is a bit of a legend in the indie maker sphere right now.

Tibo and I covered so much ground in this episode I couldn’t fit it all in, so the the full 40 minute conversation available on the Indie Bites membership for $60 a year. Head to indiebites.com/membership to get access.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:46 - Why failing is important for indie hackers
• 03:30 - 1 product every 2 weeks
• 05:16 - From $3 to $20k MRR with influencer partnership
• 06:41 - Selling Tweet Hunter to Lempire
• 08:40 - What did Tibo buy with his money
• 10:34 - Acquiring Typeframe
• 16:16 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work
• Podcast: Acquired
• Indie Hacker: Marc Louvion; Damon Chen

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid, a Maid Service software that has just hit $200k MRR. Amar is a seasoned bootstrapped entrepreneur, having started ZenMaid back in 2013. Amar’s story shows the power of sticking with something through the hard times, and having an unsexy niche (aka not selling to other indie hackers) can lead to a phenomenal indie business.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:53 Scaling in the first 2 years
• 04:38 Growing an indie business in a price sensitive niche
• 06:54 Travelling while indie hacking
• 08:12 Losing 40% of revenue in 6 months
• 13:23 Hustle Porn - Should indie hackers work harder?
• 15:38 Recommendations

Reccos

• Book: The Fish That Ate The Whale by Rich Cohen
• Podcast: exitfive by Dave Gerhardt
• Indie Hacker: Jesse Hanley

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Matt Medeiros is the founder of WP Minute, a weekly podcast highlighting WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. He’s a podcasting expert, having previously worked as Director of Podcasting success at Castos and now hosts & produces Breakdown, a podcast by Gravity forms. This episode talks about how you can make a sustainable 5-figure side project, with a niche audience while working a full time job and increasing your opportunities as you do it.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:32 From the family car business to digital agency with his dad
• 03:35 Becoming a Wordpress Expert and Starting Matt Report
• 04:45 Using podcasting as a networking tool
• 05:56 From Matt Report to WP Minute
• 08:08 Monetizing WP Minute
• 09:36 Making money from a small audience
• 10:58 Having a profitable side project alongside a full time job
• 12:08 Does Matt want to sell WP Minute?
• 14:48 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Podcast about Books: Six Pixels of Separation
• Podcast: Podcasting 2.0
• Indie Hacker: Carl Hancock

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

Manu Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter he bootstrapped to $700k. In 2023, he acquired 2 newsletters to bring the subscriber count to 100k and raised a small 250k funding round to help boost growth.

Max Haining is the founder of 100DaysofNoCode and 100DaysofAI, which are bootcamps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills. Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100DaysofNoCode as a challenge for himself to learn NoCode tools during covid, but as more people joined in, he realised he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform which he’s now working on full time.

Follow Max:

• Twitter

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:28 - Max early life
• 03:31 - University student inspired by Zuck
• 04:59 - Discovering indie hacking
• 06:13 - Starting 100DaysofNoCode
• 09:45 - Turning 100DaysofNoCode from a challenge to a business
• 13:39 - What marketing tactics has Max used
• 15:09 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book - Get Together 
• Podcast - My First Million
• Indie Hacker - Marc Louvion

My links

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Join the membership
• Personal Website
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)
• This Indie Life Podcast

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.