Today I’m joined by Tom Evans and Jonathan Bull from EmailOctopus, an email platform who have bootstrapped to over $3m ARR since they were founded in 2014. They’ve been battling in a crowded and competitive market, with some huge funded companies to contend with, but they’ve made it work in an indie way. In this episode we talk about how they lost 99% of their users overnight, why they’ve chosen to compete on price rather than in a niche and their reasoning behind staying bootstrapped for so long. Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership 00:00 Intro 01:24 EmailOctopus Background 02:57 How long did EmailOctopus take to build? 03:09 Launching for free 05:45 Tom joining EmailOctopus 07:11 Growth 07:48 Building in a crowded market 08:55 Differentiating on price 11:30 Raising vs bootstrapping 12:58 Changing goals as a bootstrapper 15:07 Fulfilling the side project urge Recommendations Book: ReWork, Four Thousand Weeks Podcast: The Rest is Politics, Indie Bites Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels, Jeffrey Bunn Guest Links Jonathan's Twitter Tom's Twitter Blog post about their growth My links Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Indie Bites YouTube Join the membership Personal Website 2 Hour Podcast Course PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast) This Indie Life Podcast 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.