From lifelong bootstrapper to raising calm funding - Brian Casel, ZipMessage

11/13/21 • 15 min

Brian Casel is a veteran of the bootstrapping game, having left his full-time job back in 2008. You might have heard him on the Boostrapped Web podcast where he shares his journey starting and building software products. Over the years Brian has pretty much done it all, built software businesses, courses, productized services and even sold some along the way. Most recently, Brian has been working on ZipMessage, a new way to communicate asynchronously.

➡️ Get the uncut, 60 minute recording with Brian on the Indie Feast membership here.

What we covered in this episode:

Where did the idea of ZipMessage come from?
How Brian validated ZipMessage
Brian's unconventional approach to validation
Why Brian raised funding from Calm Company Fund
How can people go from freelancer to productized service
The importance of building processes in productized services
Why Brian didn't follow his passion for music

Recommendations

Book: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Podcast: Smartless
Indie Hacker: James McKinven (errm...)

Follow Brian

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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

➡️ Get the uncut, 60 minute recording with Brian on the Indie Feast membership here.

What we covered in this episode:

Where did the idea of ZipMessage come from?
How Brian validated ZipMessage
Brian's unconventional approach to validation
Why Brian raised funding from Calm Company Fund
How can people go from freelancer to productized service
The importance of building processes in productized services
Why Brian didn't follow his passion for music

Recommendations

Book: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Podcast: Smartless
Indie Hacker: James McKinven (errm...)

Follow Brian

Follow Me

Sponsor - Fathom Analytics

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

Link → https://usefathom.com/bites

Previous Episode

Leaving a $500k job to build a portfolio of small bets - Daniel Vassallo

In 2019 Daniel Vassallo left his $500k salaried job at Amazon to go indie. In the 2 years since he left Daniel has placed many small bets, something he's become known for. In particular Daniel has seen success from his Info Products and building his audience on Twitter, which has grown from 0 to 91k. He wrote a short book on the good parts of AWS, which has made $126,000, then following the Twitter growth, wrote a book called Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience, which has made $244,000. He shares all of his revenue reports in his Profit and Loss community, which in itself has made over $30k in the past year. In total, and in just over 2 years, Daniel has made $570k in revenue and $306k in profit since leaving his job at Amazon. But he's gained something he didn't have while working for someone else, freedom.

➡️ Get the uncut, 80 minute recording with Daniel on the Indie Feast membership here.

What we covered in this episode:

Leaving a $500k job at Amazon to go Indie
The trap of judging your life based on financial value
Why the initial focusing on one product didn't work out for Daniel
Where the small bets mindset originated
How to deal with context switching with small bets
Dealing with an uncertain income
Why info products work well for a small bets strategy
How book publishers work and how we can apply their methods
The importance of the "small" in small bets
How you can build a twitter audience like Daniel
Why Daniel started making wooden cutting boards
How he made $2,600 from one tweet

Recommendations

Book: Anti Fragile by Nassim Taleb
Podcast: Indie Hackers
Indie Hacker: Peter Askew

More on Daniel

Follow Me

Sponsor - Fathom Analytics

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

Link → https://usefathom.com/bites

Next Episode

Nailing your marketing as a founder - Peter Suhm, Reform

Peter Suhm is the co-founder of Reform, a tool that lets you easily create simple, brandable forms. Peter is also part of the Tiny Seed 1st batch, where he was working on a product called branch Branch. After that didn't work out, he went through a period of testing and validating ideas.

One of those ideas was a investor update tool, where Peter discovered how convoluted creating a form with existing tools was. Using Twitter and a very early stage MVP, he validated the idea for Reform and got to work building.

Since then he's had #1 Product of the Week on Product Hunt and is now working through the challenges of building features and growing revenue. You might have also heard Peter on the Out of Beta podcast, which he co-hosts with Matt Wensing.

➡️ Get the uncut, 30 minute conversation with Peter on the Indie Bites membership here.

What we covered in this episode: