Indie Bites

James McKinven

Short, bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses.

  • 15 minutes 39 seconds
    How Podsqueeze grew to $16k MRR in 18 months - Tiago Ferreira

    Tiago Ferreira is the co-founder of Podsqueeze, an AI podcast tool that helps automate your podcast content. The tool, that helps you create show notes, newsletters, social posts and more, is currently doing $16k MRR and growing. You might also know Tiago from his podcast Wannabe Entrepreneur, where he’s interviewed impressive founders including Pieter Levels.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 - Intro
    • 120 - Tiago Ferreira
    • 01:06 - Tiago's background
    • 02:25 - Lessons from failures
    • 03:40 - Starting Podsqueeze - solving your own problem
    • 05:53 - How Podsqueeze had a successful launch
    • 06:40 - How to have a successful launch
    • 08:10 - Growth tactics for Podsqueeze - SEO
    • 13:03 - Future plans and exit
    • 14:28 - Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    13 September 2024, 6:00 am
  • 16 minutes 41 seconds
    How Buy Me A Coffee grew to millions of users - Jijo Sunny

    Today I’m joined by Jijo Sunny, who is the co-founder of Buy Me A Coffee, one of the most popular donation and membership platforms on the internet. They’ve processed 10’s of millions for creators and have built a 26 strong team. Since founding Buy Me A Coffee, Jijo has dabbled in all sorts of projects, including a stint in YC with a podcasting app. Now though, Jijo is back building a new product, Voicenotes, a voice driven AI note taking app.

    👉 Listen to the full 1 hour conversation with Jijo here: indiebites.com/membership

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 01:48 Background
    • 02:27 Buy Me a Coffee Origin Story
    • 03:37 How did Buy Me A Coffee grow
    • 05:35 Jijo on multiple products
    • 06:35 Making products cheap to run
    • 09:21 Starting voicenotes.com
    • 14:02 Parting advice
    • 15:56 Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    23 August 2024, 6:00 am
  • 16 minutes 10 seconds
    How focusing on customer happiness led to success for KnowledgeOwl - Marybeth Alexander

    Marybeth Alexander is the founder and Chief Executive Owl of KnowledgeOwl, a bootstrapped knowledge base software founded in 2015. Started as an idea within SurveyGizmo, where Marybeth was working at the time, the company has since flourished into a small, profitable, sustainable business ultimately being built to improve the lives of the founders, employees and customers. In this episode we talk about how Marybeth bought the company from her previous employers, how they grew through reviews and why more indie hackers should put customer happiness front and centre.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 - Intro
    • 01:26 Founding story of KnowledgeOwl (prev Help Gizmo)
    • 06:54 Marketing and Growth
    • 08:58 How to have happy customers
    • 10:54 KnowledgeOwl's appraoch to product development
    • 13:35 How important is the KnowledgeOwl brand
    • 15:07 Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    9 August 2024, 12:05 pm
  • 14 minutes 51 seconds
    Ranking #1 in Google with Lorem Ipsum and making a career out of scientific SEO - Kyle Roof

    Kyle Roof is the co-founder of High Voltage SEO, PageOptimizer Pro and Internet Marketing Gold. An agency, software and course business respectively which all focus on mastering SEO. I’ve spoken at length on the podcast before about how SEO can be such an effective tool for indie hackers to use, so Kyle is the perfect guest to talk to today.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 02:58 How Kyle learned SEO
    • 04:31 Being Scientific with SEO
    • 05:47 Why you should try paid ads
    • 07:17 Ranking top of Google with Lorem Ipsum
    • 10:15 Where do people start with SEO
    • 12:13 Encouraging word of mouth growth
    • 13:56 Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    14 June 2024, 7:52 am
  • 16 minutes 21 seconds
    Finding success with a QR code app after selling his previous indie business - Ramy Khuffash

    Ramy Khuffash is the founder of Hovercode, a QR code generator he’s working on full time. Previously, Ramy founded Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for product designers that he sold last November.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 00:56 Email Octopus Sponsor
    • 02:30 Page Flows Acquisition
    • 05:03 What did Ramy buy after he sold his company
    • 05:56 Starting Hovercode
    • 08:05 Finding new business ideas
    • 09:32 Growth for Hovercode
    • 11:22 Working with a horizontal product
    • 12:20 The perfect indie business
    • 14:48 Ramy's future

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    31 May 2024, 3:51 pm
  • 17 minutes 19 seconds
    From Tweet Hunter's 8 figure exit, to starting all over again - Tibo Louis-Lucas

    Tibo Louis-Lucas is a serial founder, most well known for starting Tweet Hunter and Taplio in 2021, before selling the company in 2022 for 8 figures. Since then, Tibo has gone on to acquire an AI video creation tool, Typeframes, which he spun Revid.ai recently. He actually announced after recording this that he has left Tweethunter and is back to focusing on his early stage products, which we touch on in this episode. He’s also started a newsletter with over 50k subscribers and has over 115k Twitter followers. Tibo is a bit of a legend in the indie maker sphere right now.

    Tibo and I covered so much ground in this episode I couldn’t fit it all in, so the the full 40 minute conversation available on the Indie Bites membership for $60 a year. Head to indiebites.com/membership to get access.

    Timestamps:

    • 00:00 - Intro
    • 01:46 - Why failing is important for indie hackers
    • 03:30 - 1 product every 2 weeks
    • 05:16 - From $3 to $20k MRR with influencer partnership
    • 06:41 - Selling Tweet Hunter to Lempire
    • 08:40 - What did Tibo buy with his money
    • 10:34 - Acquiring Typeframe
    • 16:16 - Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    16 May 2024, 11:57 am
  • 16 minutes 50 seconds
    Building a $200k MRR bootstrapped maid software for a price sensitive niche - Amar Ghose, ZenMaid

    Amar Ghose is the founder of ZenMaid, a Maid Service software that has just hit $200k MRR. Amar is a seasoned bootstrapped entrepreneur, having started ZenMaid back in 2013. Amar’s story shows the power of sticking with something through the hard times, and having an unsexy niche (aka not selling to other indie hackers) can lead to a phenomenal indie business.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 02:53 Scaling in the first 2 years
    • 04:38 Growing an indie business in a price sensitive niche
    • 06:54 Travelling while indie hacking
    • 08:12 Losing 40% of revenue in 6 months
    • 13:23 Hustle Porn - Should indie hackers work harder?
    • 15:38 Recommendations

    Reccos


    My links

    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.

    10 May 2024, 12:58 pm
  • 16 minutes 28 seconds
    Building WP Minute, a 5-figure side project without a huge audience - Matt Medeiros, WP Minute

    Matt Medeiros is the founder of WP Minute, a weekly podcast highlighting WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. He’s a podcasting expert, having previously worked as Director of Podcasting success at Castos and now hosts & produces Breakdown, a podcast by Gravity forms. This episode talks about how you can make a sustainable 5-figure side project, with a niche audience while working a full time job and increasing your opportunities as you do it.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Intro
    • 01:32 From the family car business to digital agency with his dad
    • 03:35 Becoming a Wordpress Expert and Starting Matt Report
    • 04:45 Using podcasting as a networking tool
    • 05:56 From Matt Report to WP Minute
    • 08:08 Monetizing WP Minute
    • 09:36 Making money from a small audience
    • 10:58 Having a profitable side project alongside a full time job
    • 12:08 Does Matt want to sell WP Minute?
    • 14:48 Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    25 April 2024, 2:09 pm
  • 16 minutes 12 seconds
    Building a $700k ARR newsletter - Manu Cinca, Stacked Marketer

    Manu Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter he bootstrapped to $700k. In 2023, he acquired 2 newsletters to bring the subscriber count to 100k and raised a small 250k funding round to help boost growth.

    10 April 2024, 2:01 pm
  • 15 minutes 45 seconds
    Bootstrapping the 100DaysOfNoCode learning platform - Max Haining

    Max Haining is the founder of 100DaysofNoCode and 100DaysofAI, which are bootcamps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills. Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100DaysofNoCode as a challenge for himself to learn NoCode tools during covid, but as more people joined in, he realised he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform which he’s now working on full time.

    Follow Max:

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 - Intro
    • 01:28 - Max early life
    • 03:31 - University student inspired by Zuck
    • 04:59 - Discovering indie hacking
    • 06:13 - Starting 100DaysofNoCode
    • 09:45 - Turning 100DaysofNoCode from a challenge to a business
    • 13:39 - What marketing tactics has Max used
    • 15:09 - Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    3 April 2024, 5:00 am
  • 15 minutes 37 seconds
    Bouncing back from losing 70% revenue - Max Serrano, IGotAnOffer

    Max Serrano is the founder of IGotAnOffer, a bootstrapped coaching platform focused on helping people get jobs and progress their career. Initially starting out in consulting, Max started IGotAnOffer on the side, creating digital products to help people land consulting jobs, but pivoted to coaching after they lost 70% of their revenue in the tech hiring freeze, having to lay off the majority of his staff. Now, with a profit first mentality, they are on a growth trajectory again.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 - Intro
    • 03:16 - What indie hackers can learn from management consulting
    • 04:42 - The idea for IGotAnOffer
    • 06:23 - Slicing pie method of splitting equity
    • 07:39 - From side project to full time
    • 08:29 - Fixing a revenue plateau
    • 10:49 - Losing 70% of revenue
    • 12:46 - Getting back to profitiability
    • 13:49 - Pay yourself
    • 14:46 - Recommendations

    Recommendations

    My links

    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.

    27 March 2024, 8:34 am
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