Make Lemonade

In this episode, we’re going to have a good old catch up about the state of play at Lemon Squeezy. How the most recent Black Friday period has been, what new features have been released recently, how the team growth is going and some of the new features in the works (including building a marketplace from scratch).

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:45 Not meeting your cofounders
• 07:13 Black Friday / Cyber Monday growth
• 13:22 Hiring
• 23:16 Building a marketplace
• 35:05 New feature: Wedges
• 37:21 Upcoming guests

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy.

In this episode James and JR address mental health challenges within startups, which can put a particular amount of stress on founders and employees. This episode is particularly poignant because the recording day marked the anniversary of the death of JR’s friend from mental health. We discuss how we've both had our own run-ins with depression and anxiety, what we've done to overcome it and how JR approaches this with his employees at Lemon Squeezy.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:23 JR's surprise
• 03:18 Why we're talking about mental health
• 09:26 JR and James' own struggles
• 17:49 Dealing with mental health / finding the root cause
• 20:32 Burnout in startups
• 24:50 Addressing employee mental health
• 29:11 The tricky balance of knowing when to push
• 34:35 Lemon Squeezy updates

Links

• Football fan mental health video
• The Obstacle is the Way book
• Therapy James uses

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy.

Today we’re joined by our first guest of the series, Aaron Francis, who is currently an Educator at Planet Scale, but you would have seen him all around the internet doing courses, YouTube videos, podcasts and more. In this episode we discuss the creation and launch of Screencasting.com, a course Aaron made teaching you how to make better screencasts. We go into detail on how to structure the course, marketing, pricing and what Aaron plans to do in the future. Oh, and we discuss JR and Aaron’s priciest domains…

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:44 Being a founder with a young family
• 09:17 Aaron's background
• 13:29 From accountant to software developer reading books
• 16:47 Creating Screencasting.com
• 19:04 Coming up with the curriculum
• 22:42 Having to re-record the course because of positioning
• 26:29 Spending $5k on a domain
• 30:21 Pricing for the course
• 32:30 Why JR spent $65,000 on a domain
• 33:43 The future plans for Screencasting.com
• 44:14 Avoiding burnout

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things shipping at Lemon Squeezy. Why they ship fast without breaking things, Simple Loveable Complete Products rather than MVPs and everything involved in the process.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:56 Why shipping fast is important
• 04:10 Does shipping too fast and consistently lead to bloat
• 06:27 How we ship at Lemon Squeezy
• 11:50 Sprint cycles
• 13:25 50% unplanned time
• 19:27 Making high quality features
• 22:22 Does the size of Lemon Squeezy give a shipping advantage
• 24:35 Tying in marketing
• 30:54 Justin Jackson question on shipping cadence
• 35:45 Arvid Kahl question on open source
• 42:37 Are Lemon Squeezy fees too high?

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

Now, if you knew you were going to sign a piece of paper that was going to make your company worth $50m, would you turn it down and walk away? Well, that’s exactly what has happened with JR and the Lemon Squeezy team, and is why we’ve had a brief break from the pod.

But we’re back, and JR is ready to share all. We’ve lined up a cracking few episodes for this series of the show, including talking about walking away from the money, how shipping works at Lemon Squeezy, some of the mental challenges that come along with building a startup and a few special guest appearances along the way.

In this episode, we’re going to be unpacking the process of raising series A funding, what are the things they don’t tell you, how long does it take, do you have to go to San Fransisco and ultimately making the big decision to turn down a life changing raise.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
02:15 Topics for Season 3
04:15 What's been happening at Lemon Squeezy
08:11 The different types of raises
12:42 Why explore fundraising?
15:21 Raising in a challenging market
16:27 The pitching process
21:16 Choosing the right partner/VC
23:22 Things JR got caught out by
30:39 Why turn down the funding?

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

Today we’re joined by the formidable Jack Ellis, co-founder of Fathom Analytics, the simple, privacy focused alternative to Google Analytics. While Jack isn’t running a successful software company, he spends time teaching people with his courses. He has two, which have made over $250k cumulatively

Timestamps:

01:31 - Becoming the face of Fathom
10:35 - Google vs Fathom
13:22 - What are the alternatives to GA?
15:56 - Product Growth Challenges
18:27 - How does the Fathom team work?
22:30 - Handling growth when questioning growth (at all costs)
25:09 - Charging for a product that is usually free
28:49 - Why focus on privacy
34:24 - Who is Lemon Squeezy's customer?
36:00 - Afilliates update
37:18 - Making $250k with courses
43:10 - Would they ever sell Fathom?
45:42 - Jack Outside of work

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

Today JR and James joined by Arvid Kahl, who previously built and sold his SaaS, Feedback Panda, for a life changing amount of money. From then Arvid has made it his mission to help other indie founders build a successful bootstrapped business, through his books Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entrepreneur and also his weekly blog, newsletter and podcast, The Bootstrapped Founder.

In this episode we talk all about how Arvid motivates himself to show up to write content every week, the economics behind a creator business and why he doesn’t just build another SaaS.

Timestamps:

03:49 Arvid's backstory
06:25 Writing Zero to Sold
11:54 Life after exiting your company
13:23 What's it like writing a book
16:41 Thinking in decades
19:05 Would Arvid start another SaaS?
22:42 Hiring external help
24:32 Recording interviews vs solo podcasts
28:25 The business side of The Bootstrapped Founder
34:55 Finding purpose post-acquisition
36:51 Funding vs Bootstrapping
43:01 Arvid's thoughts on the Great Gumroad Migration
48:19 Arvid's reading list

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

Today we’re bringing you a Lemonhead episode where JR and James take you behind the scenes of what it takes to build a affiliate feature from scratch and how the team are shaping up for launch. Hope you enjoy this little peek under the surface of how the Lemon Squeezy team operates.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:42 Is running Lemon Squeezy stressful?
01:32 Feeling the pull of Lemon Squeezy momentum
06:00 Investing in the podcast for transparency
09:43 Affliate Beta Launch
12:14 What is different about Lemon Squeezy affiliates
13:23 Why go so deep on the affiliate programme features?
19:24 Creator Highlight - Cedric Moore

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

Today we’re joined by Thomas Frank, a YouTube creator with over 2.8m subscribers on his main channel and 138k subscribers on his Notion-focused channel, Thomas Frank Explains. He started out helping ambitious college students study better and pivoted to the self-help/personal development niche. He’s a creator in every sense, going from YouTube videos to writing books, making courses and even launching his own platform with creator friends. Now though, a good chunk of his income is coming from selling Notion templates, making over $100k p/m consistently.

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro
(01:07) Thomas' background
(09:28) Going full time as a creator
(11:35) Consistency and growth
(15:17) How to grow on YouTube
(19:12) Why Thomas stopped posting on his main channel
(22:25) How a $100k p/m creator business works
(25:16) How to grow your business 10x with Notion templates
(30:28) Can you go too niche?
(31:54) Why not continue with the main channel
(33:41) Notion and productivity tools
(41:05) Building a streaming service - Nebula
(45:13) Switching from Gumroad to Lemon Squeezy
(51:17) Outro

Links

• Pat Flynn’s income reports
• The Motivation Hacker book
• Impossible list
• Pinned tweet - 2022 income review
• Notion API course
• Taran’s editing tutorial
• Thomas’ payment thread

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy

In this episode, JR and James are joined by Brett Williams, the founder of Designjoy, a one-man productized design service that was making $160k p/m at it's peak. People have been asking the question “how does he do it?” and previously you had to rely on meta-analysis to find out. Now Brett is going to tell you EXACTLY how he runs a one-person, $1m a year business with his new course, Productize Yourself. We chat with Brett to find out all about his new course, which in itself has made over $100k in it’s pre-sale.

Timestamps:

01:01 - Brett's background
08:34 - Launching Designjoy
14:01 - Dealing with Twitter backlash
21:35 - Brett's "Productize Yourself" course
30:49 - How Brett spends his money

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy