Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email tool he launched in 2017. Justin was last on the podcast 2 years ago when he’d hit $15k MRR and just left his role at Stripe to focus on Buttondown. I was struck by Justin’s well thought through approach to building. He makes calculated risks and shares a lot of his learnings on his blog, Applied Cartography (which is an essential read for any indie hackers).

This episode I catch up with Justin to hear how he’s grown the team to 8 people and his approach to building a company he loves. This is a cut down version of an hour long catch up I had with Justin available on the Indie Bites membership which is available at indiebites.com/membership, where we discuss his personal blog, how he structures his time as a new parent and we go deeper into hiring high agency unicorns.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:58 - Buttondown growth
• 03:40 - How to build a company you don't hate
• 07:16 - Marketing and positioning Buttondown
• 11:17 - Buttondown's unique home page approach
• 13:45 - Building a business you enjoy
• 15:32 - 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.

Today I’m not actually joined by an indie hacker, but by someone who can help a lot of indies out there. Josh Peleg is the Head of Biz Dev and Mergers and Acquisitions at BlueThrone. Essentially, he knows all about how to sell a business from the buyer's side.

In this episode we’re going to learn from Josh exactly what you need to know about selling your indie product. How you find an acquirer, what does the process look like and how you can get a deal over the line.

I’ve spoken to some indie hackers who have gone through exits, such as Rob Walling, Ramy Khuffash, Tibo Louis Lucas and more, but not so much from the other side. Let’s find out what it takes.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:56 What is BlueThrone
• 02:13 How to find a potential acquirer
• 04:41 How to set up your business to be sold
• 06:33 Acquirer red flags
• 08:31 Acquirer green flags
• 10:04 The type of exits and what to choose
• 13:48 Recommendations

Reccos

• Book - The Master and The Margarita
• Podcast - 20VC

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.

Arvid Kahl is returning to the podcast for the third time. In 2019, he’d just sold Feedback Panda for a life changing amount of money and then wrote the book Zero to Sold. In 2023, he was in full-on creator mode with The Bootstrapped Founder and had just released The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now, he’s still producing the content but is also spending time on his SaaS Podscan, which is an extremely ambitious tool that transcribes every podcast and let’s you track mentions of your brand.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:27 Arvid's life as a SaaS founder
• 02:48 Are people still building in public
• 03:54 No longer being a solo founder
• 05:24 Raising from Calm Fund
• 09:17 Keeping The Bootstrapped Founder running
• 12:10 Wins for 2024
• 13:36 Parting advice
• 15:08 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book - A Court of Thorns and Roses
• Podcast - The Economics of Everyday Things
• Indie Hacker - Tyler Tringas

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.

Recently I’ve been reviewing my catalogue of previous guests and have been intrigued to see where they are now, so expect to see a few more returning guests over the next few weeks.

Today is a chap who was last on the podcast 3 years ago, and is still ever present in the indie community. Pete Codes is writes the High Signal newsletter, sharing all the best indie hacking news every week. He’s making his main living through Ghostwriting for Twitter, Bluesky and LinkedIn, but he’s still launching new projects and keeping his previous projects live.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:25 How Pete stays up to date with indie hacking news
• 03:21 Twitter, Bluesky or LinkedIn
• 04:36 Is building in public dead?
• 07:30 Who is still building in public
• 09:40 Big news stories of 2024 / who has been successful
• 12:06 Pete's plan for his newsletter, High Signal
• 12:48 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.

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.