Indie Bites

Jack Ellis is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, started with Paul Jarvis in 2019. Jack handles the technical side of the business, but isn't afraid to get on the mic on their podcast, Above Board, or send out some spicy tweets. Jack also runs the Serverless Laravel course, which he launched back in 2020. After this conversation Jack has turned into a true friend, speaking with me for several hours after, a genuinely nice chap. You’re going to want the same thing after listening to this pod. Jack talks with great wisdom on how to approach bootstrapping a SaaS company and taking on a huge incumbent.

➡️ Here's my course on starting a podcast in 2 hours or less (use "bites" for $10 off)

What we covered in this episode:

• What is Fathom Analytics
• Joining as a co-founder after the company was founded
• How Fathom started
• How did they know Fathom was going to work
• What growth tactics did Fathom use to grow?
• How did they convince people to pay for analytics?
• The trade-off of free software
• How do you compete in a market with a huge incumbent
• Starting a medium competitor, Pico
• Benefits of having a co-founder
• Quitting a job for Jack's first side-project
• Starting a course (Serverless Laravel) that made $150,000

Recommendations

• Book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Podcast: Huberman Lab
• Indie Hacker: N/A

Follow Jack

• Spicy Tweets
• Personal Website

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet

Sponsor - Part Time Tech Jobs

Thank you to my friend Charlie from Weekend Club for sponsoring this episode, with his new project Part Time Tech Jobs, which is a fantastic site for finding and posting, you guessed it, part time tech jobs
If you’re looking to transistion from a full-time role to indie hacking, finding a part time role might be just the thing for you to de-risk that transition. And on the other side, if you’re looking to hire great entrepreneurial talent without breaking the bank, this is where you should post.

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Ben Stokes a full stack developer and entrepreneur based in Bristol in the UK, who's started an ice cream business and cookie dough business amongst other things. Ben, like many indie hackers, has a bunch of small side project ideas, but not enough time to do them. So he started Tiny Projects. Tiny Projects documents his progress with these small ideas, launching 6 projects since May last year, including One Item Store, which he sold, and his most recent, Mailoji, which has just crossed $10k in revenue.

Sponsor

Thank you to today's sponsor, VEED.io, who are hiring developers, designers, product people and more. So if you're looking to join a growing bootstrapper-friendly business, reach out to their CEO, Sabba ([email protected]), or take a look at their published roles here.

Get ad-free and extended conversations of the podcast with Indie Feast membership, for just £4 a month.

What we covered in this episode:

• Why Ben started an ice cream business
• Buying an ice cream machine for £700 after a few pints
• Growing a cookie dough business to £13k a month
• Why Ben started Tiny Projects
• The six projects he's worked on
• How to sell a project for $5,000, that only made $2
• Selling $10k of emoji domain names
• How to go viral on hacker news

Recommendations

• Book: Shoe Dog
• Podcast: Product Journey
• Indie Hacker: Alex West

Follow Ben

• Twitter
• Tiny Projects

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet

Harry Morton is the founder of Lower Street Media, a podcast production agency that specialises in premium podcasts for ambitious companies. Lower Street are the agency behind top shows such as Secret Leaders, Technology Untangled and WFH Daily. Harry's business has skyrocketed since COVID, doubling in size of revenue and headcount in the last 6-months as more companies start to realise how effective podcasting can be. Harry also runs Single Track Conf, a 3-day mountain-biking founder retreat.

➡️ Here's my course on starting a podcast in 2 hours or less (use "bites" for $10 off)

What we covered in this episode:

• Why start an agency? it's not exactly a dream business to start.
• How Harry grew Lowerstreet through cold outreach
  • 1st client, Ultimate Leadership Podcast
• Why the productising model didn't work out for Lowerstreet
• What Harry did in the early days for growth
• How losing 30% of revenue was a catalyst for growth
• Doubling the agency revenue in 6 months
• Quitting his job with no savings to start Lowersteet
• Not knowing what to do when starting the company
• Addressing shiny object syndrome
• Why focus vs portfolio of projects argument is BS
• The secret sauce for making a sh*t hot podcast
• How to make a show that stands out
• Starting a mountain bike community

Recommendations

• Book: Out on The Wire by Jessica Abel
• Podcast: Startup
• Indie Hacker: Andrew Wilkinson

Follow Harry

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet

Sponsor - 2 Hour Podcast

Yes, that's right, I'm sponsoring my own show 🤯

After producing hundreds of podcasts for myself and clients, I've been pouring all of my knowledge into my new course, 2 Hour Podcast, which shows you how to start, grow and monetize a podcast that takes you less than 2 hours per week.

I know lots of people who want to start a pod and reap the rewards, but struggle to find the time, which is exactly why I made this course.

I've taken a three-pronged approach to making a podcast efficiently. The first is a step-by-step video guide to creating your show, covering everything from branding, to editing to hosting. The second part is a 90 minute tutorial where I make a my own podcast completely from scratch, recording the first episode with Arvid Kahl, using the tips from part 1. The final prong is my full Notion system for creating my show, including my episode CRM, guest and outreach templates, plus an episode briefing doc.

Head to 2hourpodcast.com to get the full course and get $10 off with the code "bites" at checkout.

Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers in 2016, grew the business $8k MRR with sponsors, and then sold to Stripe 9 months later. An inspirational story that doesn't end there. Courtland has now been working from within Stripe for the past 4 years, where he continues to build on the platform and produce the excellent Indie Hackers podcast. He's a fountain of knowledge and I think you'll love this episode.

What we covered in this episode:

On Indie Hackers:

• Why did Courtland start IH?
• What is an 'indie hacker'?
• What are the pros and cons of building within Stripe?
• Does he have goals for IH set by Stripe?
• Does he have any other side projects, aside from IH?

On indie hacking:

• Where should new indie hackers start?
• How do you stay motivated as a one-person team?
• The growth of communities
• The growth of paid newsletters
• The current state of bootstrapping

Quick fire

• Favourite indie hackers are; Lynne Tye, Rosie Sherry, Amy Hoy, Natalie Nagele.
• Best book for indie hackers; Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sapiens, Hooked.
• Favourite podcast; Conversations with Tyler.

Follow Courtland

• Twitter

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website

Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.

‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’

‘Absolutely love this community.’

These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.

We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.

Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.

Full Transcript

James: Courtland has inspired so many of us to build our profitable internet businesses. Let's talk to him to find out what's important as an indie hacker in 2020. Courtland, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Courtland: Excellent James. Thanks for having me.

James: To set the scene and for those that might not know, tell me a little bit more about what Indie Hackers is and why you started the website?

Courtland: Yeah. So I moved to the Bay Area when I was like 23. I wanted to start a very stereotypical high growth tech startup. I wanted to be a unicorn company. I wanted to make billions and be world famous. After seven or so years of that struggle, I was just tired of it. I got tired of the VC funded software world.

And so I took time off work. I was doing a lot of contract development and I just started searching for other examples of people who've done the same thing. And it turns out there wasn't really a good way to learn how to do this. Everybody online was doing the same thing I was doing; just like looking for comments left by Pieter Levels or like tweets where some people would share some tidbit of their story, but like we couldn't find anything great. And so I kind of just solved my own problem and said, you know, I should build the thing that helps people do this. I was surprised it didn't exist. And here we are 4 years later, somewhat ironically, I decided that I wanted to be a bootstrapper. I decided that I wanted to get out of the high growth startup game.

And within a year, starting Indie Hackers, it was acquired by Stripe and fulfilled one of the goals of a lot of people in the high growth startup game want to. So that's how we got to where we are today.

James: What is your definition of an indie hacker?

Courtland: I think Tyler Tringas actually put it well recently. He said that "the new Ameri...

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a learning platform dedicated to mindful productivity while also studying neuroscience part-time at King's College with her masters. Previously Anne-Laure worked at Google leaving that job in 2017. As part of Ness Labs, she creates some truly exceptional content that I've had shared with me time and time again, which is evidenced by her 19,000 strong email lists for her newsletter, Maker Mind.

Here's what we covered in this episode:

On Ness Labs

• Tell me a little about your back story and why you started Ness Labs?
• What is Ness Labs?
• When did you start generating revenue?
• What have you done to grow the membership & newsletter subscribers?
• Neuroscience at King's College on the side! How does that help you research and write articles?
• You're a proponent of building in public, what are the benefits of this for indie hackers?
• You have a sizeable audience, how do you cut through the noise / deal with the inbound?
• What advice would you give to aspiring female indie hackers navigating a male-dominated sector?

On mindful productivity

• What is mindful productivity?
• You're a prolific writer, how do you get so much done?!
• Time management article
• It can be long and hard to grow a side-project / business, how do you stay motivated?
• As indie hackers, what are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed?
• Taking care of yourself. Sleep, taking breaks, journaling. Why is it important and why do so many people neglect it?

Quick fire

• Favourite book is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
• Anne-Laure doesn't listen to podcasts 😱
• Follow Marie Denis, Steph Smith and Rosie Sherry

Follow Anne-Laure

• Twitter
• Ness Labs

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website

Full Transcript

James: Anne-Laure, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Anne-Laure: Great. Thanks for having me.

James: Good to have you. Tell me a little bit more about Ness Labs for people who don't know? What's it all about?

Anne-Laure: Ness Labs is a platform for ambitious makers, knowledge workers, creators who want to be their most productive and creative without sacrificing or mental health, and so it offers content, a community, and also coaching for people to achieve these goals.

James: Yeah. And where did you come up with the idea?

Anne-Laure: I both at Google and while working at startups, I went through burnout and I think lots of ambitious people have this experience at some point in their work life. And when I was looking for resources to help me go through this, there's actually wasn't much out there. So it started with this goal of helping people really taking care of their mental health at work.

I've always been fascinated with how the mind works, how the brain works, how do we think, or where do ideas come from? How do we make decisions? So that's always been an area that I've been really curious about.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Where are you at now in terms of subscribers and revenue with Ness Labs? And was it always generating revenue?

Anne-Laure: So in the first six months of Ness Labs, most of the revenue was coming from sponsors. And I didn't really like this model because it meant having to chase them, a lot of back and forth. Also quite irregular revenue where some weeks, I have three sponsors reaching out and saying, "hey, can I start with the newsletter?"

and some weeks there was no one. I figured that really wanted to have some recurring revenue that I could, even if it was growing slowly, sell something that is a bit more stable. And at this point I have about 600 members and the Ness Labs community generating about $3,000 a month.

And that doesn't include all of the, one time revenue that nest labs leaking through books and other products that I'm selling.

James: It's amazing how you've grown it and I think that there'll be a lot of indie hackers wh...