Indie Bites

Today is a special episode, because it marks 100 episodes of Indie Bites. And to mark the occasion, I’m bringing back my guest from episode 1, Charlie Ward, founder of Ramen Club to talk about how he’s grown to community into the core of the London indie scene while scaling to £7k MRR in the process. Charlie has also been a long time supporter of the show, having sponsored well over 30 episodes and taking a bet on me early on.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:40 - The impact Ramen Club has on other founders
• 03:08 - Rebranding to Ramen Club
• 04:56 - Advice for community building
• 06:27 - Advice to founders on ideas and growth
• 11:10 - Why you should be doing user research
• 14:35 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: $100m Offers
• Podcast: Lex Fridman
• Indie Hacker: Elston Baretto

Other links

• Get Together book
• Continuous Discovery Habits book
• Rosieland
• Charlie's Twitter
• Ramen Club Podcast

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 Tom Evans and Jonathan Bull from EmailOctopus, an email platform who have bootstrapped to over $3m ARR since they were founded in 2014. They’ve been battling in a crowded and competitive market, with some huge funded companies to contend with, but they’ve made it work in an indie way. In this episode we talk about how they lost 99% of their users overnight, why they’ve chosen to compete on price rather than in a niche and their reasoning behind staying bootstrapped for so long.

Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:24 EmailOctopus Background
• 02:57 How long did EmailOctopus take to build?
• 03:09 Launching for free
• 05:45 Tom joining EmailOctopus
• 07:11 Growth
• 07:48 Building in a crowded market
• 08:55 Differentiating on price
• 11:30 Raising vs bootstrapping
• 12:58 Changing goals as a bootstrapper
• 15:07 Fulfilling the side project urge

Recommendations

• Book: ReWork, Four Thousand Weeks
• Podcast: The Rest is Politics, Indie Bites
• Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels, Jeffrey Bunn

Guest Links

• Jonathan's Twitter
• Tom's Twitter
• Blog post about their growth

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.

In this episode I have a returning guest, someone who is a keystone of the bootstrapping community, it’s Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor, MegaMaker and more. Today we have an unstructured but very useful chat about building a financial engine for your business. This is a topic that has come up countless times in my indie journey and I think it’s something that a lot of indie businesses don’t address as early and seriously as they should. There a ton of actionable tips in this conversation about how to manage your finances, building a solid, profitable business and what to do when things aren’t going well.

Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:45 James shocked by tax
• 02:31 Profit first
• 06:51 Building a financial engine
• 09:40 Things falling apart with depression
• 11:00 Desperation affects creativity
• 11:49 How to build your financial engine

Recommendations (from prev ep)

• Book: Life Profitability
• Podcast: Software Social
• Indie Hacker: Derek Sivers

Follow Justin

• Twitter
• Blog

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

Rob Walling is an absolute legend in the bootstrapping and indie scene. He’s a veteran entrepreneur with his most notable exit being Drip in 2016. Rob also founded MicroConf, started TinySeed and is the host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, which has over 680 episodes having started in 2010. It doesn’t stop there for Rob, he’s also written 4 books, Start Small Stay Small, Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together and most recently, The SaaS Playbook.

Get the hour long episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro / Sponsor
• 02:03 Why Rob wouldn't do SaaS again
• 03:43 What would an alternative reality look like for Rob
• 05:46 Founder retreats
• 07:40 Building an audience first approach is dumb for SaaS
• 10:29 Building a network
• 12:38 Portfolio of projects
• 15:26 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: Founding Sales, Deploy Empathy
• Podcast: Comic Lab
• Indie Hacker: Ruben Gamez

Follow Rob

• Twitter
• Website

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.

Aaron Francis is currently an Educator at Planet Scale, but you would have seen him all around the internet doing courses, YouTube videos, podcasts and more. Notably he was a founding member of the Hammerstone team, which he’s recently left, to focus his energy on doing something he loves. Most recently, Aaron has launched Screencasting.com, a course teaching you how to make better screencasts.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:25 Aaron's Background
• 02:10 Learning Software Engineering through books
• 03:24 Audience Building
• 05:51 Benefits of each content medium
• 08:07 Making time for everything
• 09:27 Having a full time job
• 10:23 Leaving Hammerstone
• 12:36 Launching Screencasting.com
• 14:33 How has the launch gone?
• 15:25 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book - Any textbook in your field
• Podcast - No Plans to Merge
• Indie Hacker - Jordan O’Connor

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 a returning guest, Andy Cloke, who runs Data Fetcher. Data Fetcher is an API plugin for Airtable that he’s grown to 20k MRR. In our previous episode Andy was only at around £3k MRR, so in this conversation we talk about what he’s done to grow so rapidly, including investing in new marketing channels such as YouTube.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:58 Growing to 20k MRR
• 04:51 Building a machine
• 06:01 YouTube Strategy
• 09:09 Launching another product
• 11:38 Hiring and reinvesting into the business
• 13:07 Future of Data Fetcher

Recommendations

• Book: Psychology of Money
• Podcast: Acquired
• Indie Hacker: Curtis Herbert

Follow Andy

• Twitter

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 Andrew Kamphey, who is the founder of Better Sheets, a platform of tools and tutorials to get better at using Google Sheets, that has done well over $200k in revenue since he launched in 2020. He started out working as a tech on cruise ships, before moving to LA to work in the film industry, which is where he gained all of his Google Sheets prowess. From here he’s had a meandering life journey, working while travelling South East Asia, starting and selling an influencer newsletter, writing a book about charging and even launching a SaaS. Andrew has had his finger in piece of the indie hacking pie and has now settled on being the Google Sheets guy. At least for now.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Intro
• 02:08 - Failing to go full time
• 04:13 - Selling Influence Weekly
• 06:26 - Starting BetterSheets
• 09:32 - Turning Better Sheets into a full time income
• 11:53 - Reluctancy to become the "Google Sheets Guy"
• 13:37 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: Lying for Money
• Podcast: The Deep Life
• Indie Hacker: Jon Yongfook, Danny Postma, James & Danielle

Follow Andrew

• Twitter

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.

Jonny White is the founder of Ticket Tailor, a platform for selling tickets online doing over £6m ARR and growing. Jonny founded Ticket Tailor in 2011, grew it to £2k MRR and then sold it to a company called TimeOut a short while later. After a few stagnant years at TimeOut, Jonny then bought the company back to make the lifestyle business he’d always wanted. After hitting all his goals, Jonny made the decision to build out a team and bootstrap the company to profitability and beyond. Now with a team of 20+ people, Jonny has a whole new set of challenges he’s dealing with, which we dig into in this episode.

Get the hour long episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:51 - Jonny's background
• 02:48 - The idea for Ticket Tailor
• 04:39 - Getting those first few customers
• 05:14 - Reaching £2k MRR and considering fundraising
• 06:34 - Selling the company
• 08:00 - Buying back Ticket Tailor
• 09:17 - Post buy back
• 11:13 - Hiring a team / going beyond a lifestyle biz
• 12:12 - COVID
• 13:59 - Losing motivation post-covid
• 15:45 - Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book: Donut Economics
• Podcast: Missing Cryptoqueen
• Indie Hacker: Pietro Saccamani

Follow Jonny

• Twitter

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.

Ryan Gilbert is the creator of the Workspaces newsletter, which showcases the best workspaces in tech and beyond. He grew it to 6,000 subscribers and $2k per month with sponsors + affiliates, before being acquired by Loops (Founder Chris Frantz was on episode 61) and going on to be their first employee. In this episode we talk about how simplicity has been so important for growth of the newsletter, how he makes it appealing for guests to share and his reasoning for selling at such an early stage.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:26 Life before Workspaces
• 03:37 Did you have any side projects before workspaces?
• 04:47 Growth of the Workspaces newsletter
• 06:40 How long did each edition take?
• 07:45 The best workspaces
• 08:25 Monetizing the newsletter
• 10:22 Selling the newsletter
• 13:08 Imposter syndrome
• 13:57 Recommendations

Recommendations

• Book - The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
• Podcast - Creator Science
• Indie Hacker - Brett Williams

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.

Tim Leland is the founder of T.LY, a link shortener with almost half a million users that he recently quit his job to pursue full time. Tim started out building chrome extensions, including a weather extension that grew to 200k users at it’s peak. He then capitalised on Google closing down their link URL shortener and tried to build his own competitor, which is where T.LY was born. Tim has gone for the high volume, low price option for his product, which often isn’t recommended as a good route for Indie Hackers, but Tim has made it work.

• 00:00 Intro
• 05:15 Building a portfolio of extensions
• 07:45 Starting T.LY
• 10:06 Being the low price option
• 11:49 Getting users for T.LY
• 12:51 Quitting his job
• 15:13 Reccos

Recommendations

• Book - Atomic Habits
• Podcast - My First Million
• Indie Hacker - Rob Walling

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.