Indie Bites

Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio, a SaaS business that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses, co-host of the fantastic podcast Software Social and author of the book Deploy Empathy, which is all about how to do great customer interviews. We cover a lot of ground in this short episode, including how to write a book, building in public and mental health as a founder. Along with some concrete tips on how exactly you can do customer research.

What we covered in this episode:

• Michele’s podcast tour
• Building in public
• Why context is important for Twitter debates
• The real reason Michele wrote her book
• Starting with a newsletter
• How to do customer research
• How to understand your customers
• Changing their podcast support model
• Mental health as a founder
• Being a founder with ADHD

Recommendations

• Book: The Little Book that Builds Wealth; Charlie Wilson’s War
• Podcast: The Indicator
• Indie Hacker: Marie Ng

Follow Michele

• Twitter
• Personal site

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.

Macgill Davis and Will Goto are the founders of Rize, a time-tracking platform that helps you increase your productivity, started in August 2020. Will and Macgill met at a company called Peer, which then got acquired by Twitter, they then left Twitter and founded a company called Humble Dot, which they raised for but unfortunately had to shut down.

Join the membership for extended conversations 👈

What we covered in this episode:

• Working on a side project while at Twitter
• Raising funding then leaving their jobs
• Co-founders with the same technical background
• A different approach to finding a co-founder
• Shutting down a business when it’s not doing well
• Searching for a new idea and solving your own problem
• Creating a landing page and running some ads
• Picking a market to focus on
• Time tracking for productivity
• Getting traction through AppSumo
• Cash up front with lifetime deals
• Raising vs bootstrapping
• How to be more productive

Recommendations

• Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport, Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Podcast: The Rest is History/Revolutions, Masters of Scale
• Indie Hacker: Tony Dinh, Arvid Kahl

Follow

• Macgill on Twitter
• Will 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.

Milly Tamati is not your usual founder. She lives on an remote island off Scotland with a population of just 170 people, previously co-owned a hostel in Thailand, co-founded a wine-tour in Australia and founded an illustration-agency in the UK. Now she’s working on a community called generalist.world, where’s she’s helping generalists like us indie hackers, find like minded individuals and jobs that fit us well.

What we covered in this episode:

• Living on a remote island with 170 people
• Remote life vs city life
• Being isolated when not in a city
• Embracing communities
• Milly’s crazy career journey
• Getting a customer in 12 hours
• Testing your product before you launch
• Why generalists aren’t valued in the world
• Growing to 850 community members in a few months
• How to cultivate community

Recommendations

• Book - Range by David Epstein
• Podcast - Lennys Podcast
• Indie Hacker - Molly Retter

Follow Milly

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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 Dominik Sobe, the founder of Helpkit, a product he started last year that turns Notion pages into a professional help center, doing $4.5k MRR. In this episode we talk about Dom’s many failed projects, how he finally found something that worked with Helpkit and how he went from wanting to be a management consultant to being an indie hacker.

What we covered in this episode:

• Dom’s previous projects
• Wanting to become a management consultant
• Management consultant to indie hacker
• Making his first internet money
• Being embarrassed about your first product
• Overengineering your first product
• Building an MVP during a hackathon
• Validation before building a product
• Side projects as marketing
• Building in a growing market
• Investing in SEO

Recommendations

• Book: Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling
• Podcast: Indie Hackers
• Indie Hacker: Minh-Phuc Tran

Follow Dominik

• Twitter
• Personal Site

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.

Joe Masilotti is the founder of RailsDevs a reverse job board for Ruby on Rails developers, which is over $4k MRR and on for $100k revenue. Joe also runs the monthly Hotwire Dev newsletter, which has over 2,000 subs. And then late last year, Joe sold his side-project Mugshot Bot, which he took from idea to sale in just 14 months.

What we covered on this episode:

• How and why Joe sold Mugshot Bot at $200 MRR
• When to stop working on projects
• How RailsDevs started with a spreadsheet
• Solving a problem with a simple solution
• Why a reverse jobs board works
• A unique approach to a marketplace business
• Growing RailsDevs (from both sides)
• Being an embedded entrepreneur
• Why RailsDevs has a hiring fee and subscription
• Dealing with high churn
• Growing a newsletter to 2,300 subs

Recommendations

• Book: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
• Podcast: The Business of Authority
• Indie Hacker: Colleen Schnettler

Follow Joe

• Twitter
• Read his blog

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.

Geoff Roberts is the co-founder of Outseta, a bootstrapped all-in-one platform to help manage and grow your recurring revenue business. Before Outseta, Geoff was Head of Marketing for Buildium, a product that went through the phases of bootstrapping, raising and exiting, that was started by current co-founder Dimitris.

What we covered in this episode:

• Taking a big 15 year bet on your business
• Going into an established, durable market
• Why not raise for the company?
• Single focus vs portfolio of small bets
• Why Outseta focused on brand building and not SEO
• Marketing trade-offs
• Why freemium doesn’t work for everyone
• Building a flat, self-managed organisation

Recommendations

• Book: Reinventing Organistations; Life Profitability
• Podcast: Tim Ferris Show
• Indie Hacker: Anthony Castrio

Follow Geoff

• Twitter
• Read the Outseta Blog

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.

David Kofoed Wind is the co-founder and CEO of Eduflow an education platform started in 2015 as Peergrade, which was a peer to peer feedback tool. David is the definition of technical, having studied for a degree in applied math and computer science, then a Ph.D in machine learning. This is where the idea for Peergrade was born, as he started teach a course in data science and solved his own problem.

👉 Extended version of this episode.

What we covered in this episode:

• How Peergrade started in 2015
• Scratching your own itch
• Selling to universities
• Using your "unfair advantages"
• Why David took a Ph.D
• What it's like building a product with a Ph.D
• Having a terrible product
• Going for and ending the VC dream
• Pivoting Peergrade to Eduflow
• Why David resonates with Indie Hackers

Recommendations

• Book: Rework by Basecamp
• Podcast: Out of Beta
• Indie Hacker: Jon Yongfook

Follow David

• Twitter

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.

If you’re wanting to learn about building in public, Kevon Cheung is your guy. After not getting the fulfilment he desired from the VC funded startup dream, Kevon struck out on his own in 2020 to become an indie hacker. Since then he’s launched the Build in Public Mastery course, started a newsletter called Public Lab, wrote the Definitive Guide to Building in Public and then to top this all off, wrote a book called Find Joy in Chaos.

What we covered in this episode:

• Building credibility
• Taking a 6 month bet
• Starting from scratch to learn a trend
• Choosing to build in public
• Anyone can learn any topic
• Is building in public just sharing MRR numbers?
• What is building in public?
• False positives of building an audience
• Building a creator business
• How to differentiate course content to blog content
• Info products vs SaaS

Recommendations:

• Book: Life Is What You Make It by Peter Buffet, $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi
• Podcast: Socialette, The Bootstrapped Founder
• Indie Hacker: Monica Lent, Jay Clouse, Marie Ng

Follow Kevon

• Twitter
• Personal website

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.

Marie Ng is the founder of Llama Life, a to-do-list app that helps you focus. As someone who struggles with focus myself, Marie’s app looked to be the perfect thing. Having taught herself how to code 2 years ago, after a career in branding, Marie did what everyone does when they learn to code, build a to do list app. But with her branding background and new quirky angle on a productivity app, she’s made it work. From a solo indie project to now raising a $690k pre-seed round, Marie is making her entrepreneurial dream happen.

👉 Extended version of this episode.

What we discussed in this episode:

• How Marie got into branding
• What is branding?
• Why indie hackers should consider their “brand”
• How to create a brand
• Building a product to help with ADHD
• Building to solve your own problem
• How to work with ADHD
• Llama Life’s brand impact
• Why Marie raised funding

Recommendations

• Book: Honest Guide to Indie Making by Kyleigh Smith
• Podcast: The Best One Yet
• Indie Hacker: Carl Poppa

Follow Marie

• Twitter

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.

Chris Frantz is the co-founder of Loops, YC backed email tool for startups. Chris is one of those people who just knows how to run a SaaS business, having founded and sold Snazzy AI, acquired by Unbounce last year. Chris has been living rent free in my brain after a conversation we had a few weeks ago about my multiple projects. A lot of you are going to have multiple projects too, and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere with them. In this episode, Chris is going to explain why.

What we cover in this episode

• Some of Chris previous bootstrapped projects
  • PH profile
• How Chris started and sold Snazzy.ai
  • Selling article
• Tackling email with Loops.so
• Making the chef’s knife of email
• Why you should have a single focus
• Why having a portfolio of small bets doesn’t work
• Doing the hard things
• Having hobby projects vs a business

Recommendations

• Book: Atomic Habits
• Podcast: The Vergecast
• Indie Hacker: Sahil Bloom

Follow Chris

• Twitter
• Personal site

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• 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.