Indie Bites

Elston Baretto was last on the pod in March 2021, when he’d just grown his tool, Tiiny.host, to $600 MRR and we recorded as part of my mission to share stories of unknown indie hackers with potential. Fast forward 2 years and Tiiny Host has grown to $10k MRR and Elston has just quit his job to become a full time indie hacker.

👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co.

Topics covered:

• Hitting $10k MRR
• Why PDF hosting has been pivotal for growth
• Build what people search for
• Why SEO has been such a huge growth driver
• How to do SEO
• Going full time
• When is the right time to quit your job?
• How much to pay yourself
• Launching before it's perfect
• Pressure of growth
• How to keep indie hacking enjoyable

Recommendations

• Book: The New New Thing
• Podcast: Postgres.fm
• Indie Hacker: Vetted Founders (tbc)

Follow Elston

• Twitter
• Tiiny Host

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 - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Patrick Posner is the creator of a portfolio of Wordpress plugins which have been downloaded almost a million times collectively making him $12k p/m. Patrick went full time indie in 2020 and since then has both grown quickly and scaled back operations to build the best sort of life for him. I love these types of stories of relatively unknown indie hackers who are creating the dream life for themselves.

What we covered in this episode:

• Building Wordpress plugins on the side of a day job
• Marketing for Wordpress plugins
• Getting 1m downloads
• Beating a domain reseller
• Finding SEO keywords to rank for
• Pricing yearly vs monthly
• Growing fast and scaling back

Recommendations

• Book - Why We Sleep
• Podcast - The Bootstrapped Founder
• Indie Hacker - tbc

Follow Patrick

• 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 - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a note taking app which he’s grown to $20k MRR with a team of 4. Previously, he was the co-founder of Clearbit, a VC-backed company that scaled to $50m in revenue. After stepping down as CEO of Clearbit, he decided to focus on doing the stuff he enjoys. So he’s sailing around the world building an app that gets him excited every day.

👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co.

What we covered in this episode:

• Why Alex dropped out of school
• Coding without a CS degree
• Being unemployable
• Starting Clearbit
• Stepping down as CEO of Clearbit
• Boostrapping Reflect
• Why another note taking app?
• Building what you enjoy
• Growing to 20k MRR
• Getting the first users for your product
• Sailing around the world

Recommendations

• Book: Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space
• Podcast: In Our Time
• Indie Hacker: Adam Wathan

Follow Alex

• 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 - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Craig Hewitt is the Founder and CEO of Castos, a bootstrapped podcast hosting and analytics platform with a services arm for podcast production. He’s been in podcasting almost a decade, having started his own show, Rogue Startups and his production service Podcast Motor (which he folded into Castos). Craig not only shares his ponderings on his show, but he also writes a weekly newsletter called Founder Insights.

What we covered in this episode:

• Craig's background in sales
• Launching a podcasting productized service in 2014
• Stair stepping to SaaS
  • What is Stair Stepping?
• Acquiring Seriously Simple Podcasting
• Product positioning
• Growth and marketing for Castos
• His approach to podcasting
  • Castos Originals
• Bootstrapping vs raising
• Founder Insights newsletter

Recommendations

• Book: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan
• Podcast: Startups for the Rest of Us
• Indie Hacker: Moritz Dausinger

Follow Craig

• Twitter
• Personal website

My links

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

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Today I’m joined by Dan Fayle, who is the co-founder of Chekkit, a company that’s he bootstrapped to almost $2.5m ARR and 20 employees. There’s a few interesting things about Dan’s story I know you’re going to like. This is his first company and he quit his job to go all-in with 3 co-founders, he got his early customers through, and I’m not kidding, door to door sales and finally he’s not changed the price of the product since it’s launch 6 years ago.

What we covered in this episode:

• Dan’s background
• Why he went all-in on Chekkit from the beginning
• How he got his early customers from door to door sales
• How to make cold email work at scale
• Biggest growth channels
• How an early pivot lead to more growth
• Why they stuck to their $99 p/m price for years
• What’s next for the business

Recommendations

• Book: Shoe Dog
• Podcast: The Move
• Indie Hacker: Nathan Barry

Follow Dan

• Twitter

Follow Me

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

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs, one of the biggest and best SEO tools on the internet. Ahrefs are one of the clear success stories as a bootstrapped company, growing to be a an 8 figure brand over the past decade. Things really took off when Tim took over marketing for the company back in 2015, first focusing on growing the blog, before experimenting with different marketing channel to bring Ahrefs to its current size. In this episode Tim brings a mini SEO masterclass for SaaS founders, gives his thoughts on AI content and reveals if he has ambitions to start a indie project for himself.

Join the Indie Bites membership 👈

What we covered in this episode

• The basics of SEO for a SaaS tool
• A mini SEO masterclass for indie SaaS tools
• Why credibility is important for SEO
• Tim’s thoughts on AI content
• How “original work” is essential
• What marketing channel is going to work in 2023
• Tim’s favourite marketing experiments for Ahrefs
• Does Tim have any indie hacker ambitious to run his own company

Recommendations

• Book: Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
• Podcast: The Prince
• Indie Hacker: Tim likes everyone

Follow Tim

• Twitter
• Personal site

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

Sponsor - Ramen Club

My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.

Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.

To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.

Today I’m joined by Jared Maddern, the founder of Beamhouse Leather, a leather supply business he’s grown to £45k in sales in the past 2 years. Some of you might know I run a handmade leather wallet business on the side, called Whitstable Craft Co, and so this is a little look into the other part of my life.

Although Jared doesn’t run an indie SaaS, I wanted to bring slightly different perspective of being an indie entreprenuer. We discuss how building a business in a growing market has and selling pick axes to gold miners strategy has led to his growth, what it’s like working with physical goods and why he put £10k of his own money to take the business to the next level.

📹 Watch this episode on YouTube.

What we discussed in this episode:

• Jared’s taco truck
• How he started leathercrafting
• Where he got his first leather from
• How to learn leathercrafting
• How Beamhouse leather started
• Starting on Etsy instead of his own website
• The effect of the pandemic on hobbies
• Investing £12k for leather machinery
• Investing personal money
• Wanting to keep the business as a side project

Recommendations

• Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Podcast: My First Million
• Indie Hacker: Chris Orraman

Follow Me

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

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, a product that helps newsletter operators grow through referral partnerships. Indie hackers might know Louis from his Sales for Founders course which he ran a few years ago, as well as his many other projects.

What we covered in this episode:

• How Sparkloop Started
• How Louis met his cofounder Manuel
• Going Niche vs Broad
• Pursuing a growing market
• What is your unique competitive advantage?
• Avoiding shiny object syndrome
• Speaking to your customers
• How does a newsletter referral program work?
• Can you start a referral program from the beginning?
• What’s the value of a newsletter subscriber?
  • Sparkloop calculator
• Sparkloop growth from day 1
• How big is Sparkloop?
• How to start and grow a newsletter
• Louis’ favourite newsletters
  • Lenny’s Newsletter
  • Morning Brew
  • Why We Buy

Recommendations

• Book: Wuthering Heights
• Podcast: Default Alive
• Indie Hacker: Josh Ho

Follow Me

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

Sponsor - Ahrefs

Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.

If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.

To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

Kyle Gawley is the founder of Gravity, which he’s bootstrapped to over $25k p/m. In 2012, he scaled a vc-backed company, called Get Invited, to $5m in sales, before a near-death experience made him rethink how he lived his life. Now, Kyle is travelling the world building his bootstrapped SaaS. Let’s find out how he did it.

Join the Indie Bites membership 👈

What we covered in this episode

• Starting out on the VC path
• What Kyle loved about working in VC
• Having a near death experience
  • Listen to Kyle on Indie Hackers
• How he changed his life after
• Deciding to become a digital nomad
• Starting Gravity to solve his own problem
• What Gravity is for non-technical folks
• Pricing, should you go cheap or upstream?
• Using Twitter and SEO for customer acquisition
• Kyle’s thoughts on single focus vs small bets
• Kyle’s new AI project

Recommendations

• Book: Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl
• Podcast: Indie Bites (how meta)
• Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels

Follow Kyle

• Twitter
• Personal site

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Indie Bites YouTube
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

Sponsor - Ramen Club

My favourite community has just got a significant upgrade as it rebrands to Ramen Club, the best community to help you get to Ramen Profitability.

Ramen club has 4 remote coworking sessions a week, masterminds, accountability calls, live AMAs, a fractional CFO, in-house VA, discounts and so much more. But most of all, the founder Charlie has done a wonderful job at cultivating a wonderfully friendly and supportive community.

To join the world's most supportive community for bootstrapped founders to reach ramen profitable and beyond, head to ramenclub.so and use code "INDIEBITES" to let Charlie know I sent you and get 50% off your first month.

Sam King is the founder of Flick, a tool for managing and growing your social media, doing over $3.5m ARR fully bootstrapped. Sam has taken a unique path into bootstrapping, first being a YouTuber, then running an agency before flipping it into a SaaS with Flick. There is an hour long extended version of this show available on the Indie Bites membership, head to indiebites.com/membership to sub.

What we covered in this episode:

• Starting out as a YouTuber
• Pivoting from YouTuber to starting an agency
• Pivoting the agency to start a SaaS
• Marketing Sam used to grow Flick
• Affiliate marketing
• Building an MVP
• Hiring challenges

Recommendations

• Book: Shoe Dog
• Podcast: Diary of a CEO
• Indie Hacker: Baretto

Follow

• Sam on Twitter

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

Sponsor - Figura

Often great design makes products stand out in this day and age; stop trying to figure it out yourself. Figura offers vetted product designers for startups and fast-growing companies. Find your first designer or contractor, or land a helping hand for your product in less than 48hours. Save $199 and start your project for free, using code "INDIE199".

Head to figura.digital to try it out.