Indie Bites

Jim Raptis, an indie hacker from Greece who is working full-time on his portfolio of projects, including BrandBird and Magic Pattern, which are both doing $1,500 MRR. If you’ve seen those cool screenshots on Twitter with the nice drop shadow and gradient background, those are made with Brand Bird.

What we covered in this episode

• Quitting running a funded startup for indie hacking
• Earning that first dollar
• Learning design as an engineer
• Launching a product with less than 300 followers
• Choosing to do a portfolio of small bets
• Splitting time between multiple projects
• How Jim went grew from 300 to 9k Twitter followers
• What do to do when things aren’t going so well

Recommendations

• Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
• Podcast: Flow State
• Indie Hacker: Peter Levels

Follow Jim

• 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

Sponsor - Testimonial

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You might have seen a wall of love with a bunch of supportive Tweets and videos on various products you’ve signed up for. That wall is created using Damon Chen’s product Testimonial. All you have to do is sign up, paste the nice things people have said about you and it will generate a beautiful set of testimonials that you can easily embed on your site or share online.

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In this episode I’ve got my first ever returning guest with Dianna Allen and first ever double act as we’re joined by her fiance Jeremy Blalock. I spoke to Dianna about a year ago after growing her handmade candle business from $100 to $50k in that year. Since then Dianna is still running TERRA and doubled the revenue in 2021, but has also co-founded Inventora which has just hit $5k MRR. Inventora is inventory tracking system for handmade businesses, solving Dianna’s own problem with TERRA.

👉 Join the Indie Feast membership here.

What we covered in this episode:

• How TERRA is going
• Handmade business vs SaaS business. Which is better?
• Solving her own problem with TERRA to build Inventora
• Spreadsheet to SaaS
• Asking Jeremy (Dianna’s partner) to build the product
• Growing without paying for ads
• Leveraging existing relationships
• Choosing to raise a small funding round
• Why raise money if you’re an indie hacker?
• Spending $25,000 on a domain
• Tactics for growing to $5k MRR
• Hiring a videographer to make a documentary

Recommendations

• Books: The Innovation Stack, The Gardeners Almanack
• Podcasts: Acquired, The Product Boss
• Indie Hackers: Elon Musk, Jon Yongfook

Follow Dianna & Jeremy

• Dianna's Twitter
• Jeremy's Twitter
• Inventora Instagram
• TERRA Instagram

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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/awt.

Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad, the platform that allows creators to sell products online. The beating heart of the creator economy. You'll likely have heard Sahil's story about his failure to build a billion dollar company with an article that went viral, but let me summarise for those that haven't.

Sahil founded Gumroad in 2011, aiming to build the next unicorn, leaving Pinterest where he was employee #2. He raised $1.1m from angels, then $7m more in 2012. Things started growing, then they didn't. Sahil laid off 75% of the company to keep the product alive, moved to Provo, Utah to figure where to take Gumroad from that point. Almost a decade later Gumroad is growing quicker than ever, making millions in revenue and helping creators make a living online.

Sahil has just launched his book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, where he shares a decade of learnings on how to build a profitable, sustainable business and how entrepreneurs can do more with less to make more impact on the world.

👉 I'm giving away 5 copies of Sahil's book on Twitter, enter here.

What we covered on this episode:

• Sahil’s approach to funding
• Bootstrapping vs VC
• Why Gumroad runs so differently to most companies
• Why longevity has helped Gumroad
• Sahil’s book: The Minimalist Entrepreneur
• Building a project in a weekend: Verification Letters
• Livestream of building Verification Letters
• The framework for starting a business
• Why you should start and then learn
• Barriers people have to starting their business
• Fear of failure
• Importance of writing

Recommendations

• Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Podcast: All-In Podcast
• Indie Hacker: Naval

Follow Sahil

• Twitter
• Website

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

Sponsor - ilo Analytics

Sahil has 280k followers on Twitter and he sure knows the tweets that will engage his audience. If you too want to get a deeper understanding of what engages your followers on Twitter, you should check out ilo Analytics.

ilo helps you easily see which kind of tweets get more impressions, likes, profile clicks and more so you can get grow your Twitter audience. ilo's has beautiful graphs for the most important metrics for both tweets and threads will be sure to help you build your following.

Head to ilo.so or hit the link in the show notes and use the code INDIEBITES to get 25% off your ilo subscription for life.

Brett Williams is the founder of Designjoy, a one-man productised design service that is doing over $130k MRR, charging clients up to $5k a month for unlimited design. You indeed hear that right, Brett is running a million dollar business solo with over 40 clients.

What we covered in this episode:

• $50k per year with a Tumblr blog
• Dropping out of college and getting a regular job
• How Brett started Designjoy
• Being inspired by Design Pickle
• Launching Designjoy
• Taking 3 years to get to $10k MRR
• Non-traditional marketing and growth methods
• Launching Scribbles, a side project
• What does into a good landing page?
• Different routes to success
• Waiting till $80k to quit his job
• Should entrepreneurs be more risk-adverse?
• How run a successful 1-man productised service?

Recommendations

• Book: Company of One
• Podcast: The Dave Ramsey Show
• Indie Hacker: Suhail

Follow Brett

• Twitter
• Instagram

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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/awt.

Val Hinov is the founder of Thankbox an online group card tool that grew to $20k p/m throughout lockdown. Now Val is facing the challenges of what to do when your product scales, what to do when the wave that brought you success starts to slow and when your product has one-time purchase pricing model.

What we covered in this episode:

• Where the idea for Thankbox came from?
• Lessons learned from a failed startup
• How he built Thankbox in 2 months
• How he got his first users for Thankbox
• Building a virality model
• Using Google Ads to grow quickly
• Advice for people apprehensive of using ads
• Why social ads didn’t work
• The effect of a one-off purchase pricing model
• Having a big drop in users
  • Indie Hackers Pod
• The seasonality of online cards
• Outsourcing vs solo
• When to go full-time

Recommendations

• Book: Atomic Habits
• Podcast: The Revolutions Podcast
• Indie Hacker: Andrea Bosoni

Follow Val

• Twitter
• PersonalSite
• Thankbox

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

Sponsor - 4dayweek.io

As indie hackers we’re always trying to squeeze extra hours in our day to work on our side projects. What about if you had a whole extra day to work on your projects, while still getting a full-time salary?

4dayweek.io is the place to get a Software Job with a better work-life balance. All jobs have a 4 day work week contract and most are only 32 hours per week. Find the best remote tech jobs from companies with a great work-life balance at 4dayweek.io or hit the link in the show notes.

👉 Try it here.

Che Sampat is an 18 year old Indie Hacker who built SuperPay in 2019 when he was 15 years old, an app that lets you generate easy payment links through Stripe and Square. Since then he's grown it to 5k users, $6k in revenue and processed a whopping $15m in payments. Che has also been working at some cool companies since he was young, recently joining the payments startup Fast to focus on his career, therefore stepping back from SuperPay.

What we covered in this episode

• How Che got into coding
• Building his first app in year 9 computer science
• How Che learnt to code with YouTube
• The story of building SuperPay
• Starting his first company at 15
• Balancing indie hacking and school
• Success without idea validation
• Launching on Product Hunt with no plan
• How did Che get his first users
• Growing to $15m GMV
• Did Che buy himself anything nice?
• Getting in trouble with Stripe building SuperPortal
• Challenges of being an 18yr old indie hacker
• Why Che got himself an engineering job instead of pursuing SuperPay

Recommendations

• Book: Clean Code
• Podcast: Software Engineering Daily
• Indie Hacker: Peter Grillet

Follow Che

• Twitter

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

Sponsor - Reel.so

Reel lets you create these short teaser videos (called audiograms), with animated subtitles, waveforms and a ton of beautiful templates to choose from. Save time and set your podcast clips aside from the rest by creating these sharable snippets that grab your audience's attention as they scroll through their feed. even without sound.

I've used Reel myself for Indie Bites and it's been a game changer for me. If you want to give it a go for yourself, head to reel.so or click the link in your show notes and use the code INDIEBITES for 20% off.

👉 Try it here.

In this episode we’re joined by Tom Ross, who is the founder of Design Cuts, a marketplace and community for creatives which he’s grown to a team of 20 over the past decade. Tom is also a seasoned podcaster, co-hosting The Honest Designer's Show and Biz Buds which have been downloaded millions of times.

It's not all been plain sailing for Tom as he ran into severe burnout working 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 18 months, leading to him being hospitalised. In this episode we're going to find out more about Tom's story, some of his successes and failures in business, along advice he'd give to founders from his experiences.

👉 Get the extended version of this podcast on membership, available for £4 a month.

What we covered in this episode:

• Tom’s backstory
  • Link to pod episode
• Starting an Interpol forum
• Earning more money at home at 16 than in his job
• Growing a design blog to 15 million visitors
• Growing Design Cuts in the early days
• 10 years later, 20 employees, millions of revenue
• Mental health and burnout as a founder
  • Link to Tom’s burnout story
• How to build good routines to avoid burnout
• How community can help with your mental health
• Why community is so important
• How to build a community

Recommendations

• Book: Thank You Economy by Gary Vee
• Podcast: Diary of a CEO
• Indie Hacker: Rosie Sherry

Follow Tom

• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Website

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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/awt.

Marie Martens the co-founder of Tally, an easy way to create forms online. She left her stable marketing job to start Tally with her partner in crime Filip and became an indie hacker. Since then they've grown Tally to over 16,000 users almost $10k MRR as they work towards becoming default alive. Through a mix of manual prospecting, a successful product hunt launch and product-led growth, they’ve turned Tally into an exceptional indie success story.

-> Subscribe to my brand new podcast, No More Mondays, co-hosted with Dan Rowden here.

What we covered in this episode:

• The origin story of Tally
  • Indie Hackers episode
• A failed startup, Hotspot
• How COVID crushed their first startup
• How Tally got their first few users
• Doing things that don’t scale
• How I became Tally’s first paying customer
• Biggest source of sign ups for tally
• The benefits of product-led growth
• How to do an effective PH launch
• Going from 3,000 - 12,000 users without paid ads
• Why Marie quit her job to bootstrap
• Would she ever go back to a job
• What it’s like building your dream startup

Recommendations

• Book: Intercom on Marketing
• Podcast: Indie Hackers
• Indie Hacker: Davis Baer

Follow Marie

• Twitter

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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/awt.

Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad, a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, Matt has been on quite the journey with Astropad and we’re going to dive into all of that today, along with a mini-masterclass on PR.

What we covered in this episode:

• Origins of Astropad
• Having two technical co-founders
• How they tackled marketing with no prior knowledge
• Most useful books to learn the basics
  • 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  • Burned Out Blogger's Guide to PR
• How Matt leveraged PR in the early days
• How indie hackers can use PR for their projects
• Size of Astropad in 2022
• Why they built a hardware product
• How to get into building hardware
• The benefits of hardware products
• How Apple stole their product
• How they saved their business after being crushed by Apple

Recommendations

• Book: Radical Candour, The Making of a Manager
• Podcast: Dithering
• Indie Hacker: Monica Lent

Follow Matt

• Twitter
• Astropad Podcast

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

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/awt.

Ben Orenstein is the founder of Tuple, a tool for remote pair programmers that has been steadily growing for the past few years. Now, Ben runs Tuple with a small team and is delving into what happens when your SaaS starts to hit scale. You might have also heard Ben's voice on the Art of Product podcast, which he co-hosts with Derrick Reimer, founder of SavvyCal, talking about the behind the scenes of running their respective SaaS companies.

What we covered in this episode:

• Why Tuple is the most successful product he’s made
• How Ben’s approach to enterprise sales has changed
• How much revenue comes from enterprise sales
• How the enterprise product is differentiated
• How indie hackers can sell to bigger companies
• Where Tuple gets it’s customers from
• What does Ben’s day-to-day look like?
• Has he just built himself a job?
• The benefits of making a podcast
• Some of Ben’s favourite previous products

Recommendations

• Book: The Mom Test
• Podcast: Bootstrapped Web
• Indie Hacker: Adam Wathan

Follow Ben

• Twitter
• Blog

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course

Sponsor - Fathom Analytics

For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit. I've spent countless hours in Google Analytics dashboards trying to figure even out the most basic metrics.

This is exactly why I signed up for Fathom as soon as I heard Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building it.

Fathom is simple website analytics that doesn't suck. It's easy to use and respectful of privacy laws, with no cookies following your users around the web. They're also a bootstrapped, sustainable business so I love supporting them. Yes, it might feel strange paying for analytics at first, but once you realise the real cost of free Google Analytics and realising how easy to use Fathom is, you won't go back. You can install the lightweight code on as many websites as you want and quickly see the performance of all your sites.

Link → https://usefathom.com/bites