Marc Louvion is an indie hacker with many many products. His tagline on his website is relatable for all “I was fired everywhere so I had to work for myself (even Tai Lopez fired me...)”. If you go to Marc’s Indie Page you can see all his projects, including Habits Garden, Gamify List, Visualise Habit, Make Landing & more. Marc is living in Bali and on his way to $5k MRR across his projects. You might have seen Marc on Twitter with his hilarious launch videos and candid build in public...

In this episode I’m bringing back a previous guest, Dom Monn, who is the founder of MentorCruise, which he’s now working full time on with a small team. I brought Dom back on to discuss something that has been on my mind, and has come up in twitter conversations recently which Dom has been involved in. Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? Is the indie label and mentality limiting success and holding many founders back? I think it could be and so we discuss why this might be happening...

Today I’m joined by Bram Kanstein, who you might know from Startup Stash, which is the most upvoted product ever on Product Hunt. Bram also started the No Code MVP a course, which shows you how to launch an MVP without code. In this episode we focus a lot on how indie hackers can find ideas and launch them the right way. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 03:18 Startup Stash 05:56 No Code MVP 09:47 Finding ideas 12:22 Idea validation 15:00 Recommendations Recommendations Book - Untethered Soul by...

Matt Studdert is the founder of Frontend Mentor, which helps people level up their front-end coding skills by building projects. They have over 500,000 users and are hovering around $30k MRR. Matt didn’t start out wanting to run a SaaS, starting out playing poker, then became a personal trainer, before changing his career and learning to code when he was 28. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:16 Playing Poker full time 02:58 Becoming a personal trainer 04:24 Learning to code with General...

Jordan O’Connor is the founder of Closet Tools, a bootstrapped app that helps people sell more stuff on Poshmark which has been in and around the $30-40k MRR mark. He’s found a lot of his growth through SEO, like many successful entrepreneurs, and now helps other founders do the same through his Rank to Sell power half hours. Listen to the full 90 minute chat with Jordan here -> Timestamps 00:00 Intro 03:29 Jordan being awful with money 04:30 Jordan's indie hacking journey 06:10 Launching...

Josh Ho is the founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a SaaS he founded in 2014 doing over $2m a year in revenue. Referral Rock helps businesses to design, launch and manage a customer referral program. Josh has had decades of experience as a founder, pouring his early entrepreneurship energy into a notes app that he ultimately couldn’t monetize. Timestamps00:00 - Intro01:24 - Josh's background02:11 - Lessons from a failed startup04:16 - Failed startup to new long term bet05:41 - The idea for...

Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, which is a membership, community, newsletter and podcast helping you become build a creator business, which he bootstrapped to over $40k a month towards the end of last year. His podcast is one of the best produced shows out there and it’s on my very short list of shows that I can listen to every episode and know it’s going to be killer. I think the creator business angle is interesting for indie hackers who haven’t quite found a product yet and...

Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email newsletter tool without all the bloat. In December 2022 Buttondown was around $15k MRR. He also runs Spoonbill, which is a way to stay updated on what people change on their social profiles. At the time of recording this Justin was an engineering manager at Stripe so you’ll hear references to that, but he’s since left to go all in on being a founder. 👉 Join the Indie Bites membership here. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:57 Origins of...

Jack McDade is the creator of Statamic, a content management system for Laravel. What I love about Jack is how he approaches all of his projects, including Statamic, to just be different. There is so much cookie cutter content out there and everything just ends up looking the same - but not if Jack has anything to do with it. Just take a look at his personal website, his Radical Design course and Icons and you’ll see what I mean. I love it. 👉 Join the Indie Bites membership...

Elston Baretto was last on the pod in March 2021, when he’d just grown his tool, Tiiny.host, to $600 MRR and we recorded as part of my mission to share stories of unknown indie hackers with potential. Fast forward 2 years and Tiiny Host has grown to $10k MRR and Elston has just quit his job to become a full time indie hacker. 👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co. Topics covered: Hitting $10k MRR Why PDF hosting has been pivotal for growth Build what people search for Why SEO has been such...

Patrick Posner is the creator of a portfolio of Wordpress plugins which have been downloaded almost a million times collectively making him $12k p/m. Patrick went full time indie in 2020 and since then has both grown quickly and scaled back operations to build the best sort of life for him. I love these types of stories of relatively unknown indie hackers who are creating the dream life for themselves. What we covered in this episode: Building Wordpress plugins on the side of a day...

Alex MacCaw is the founder of Reflect, a note taking app which he’s grown to $20k MRR with a team of 4. Previously, he was the co-founder of Clearbit, a VC-backed company that scaled to $50m in revenue. After stepping down as CEO of Clearbit, he decided to focus on doing the stuff he enjoys. So he’s sailing around the world building an app that gets him excited every day. 👉 My side project, Whitstable Craft Co. What we covered in this episode: Why Alex dropped out of school Coding without a...

Craig Hewitt is the Founder and CEO of Castos, a bootstrapped podcast hosting and analytics platform with a services arm for podcast production. He’s been in podcasting almost a decade, having started his own show, Rogue Startups and his production service Podcast Motor (which he folded into Castos). Craig not only shares his ponderings on his show, but he also writes a weekly newsletter called Founder Insights. What we covered in this episode: Craig's background in sales Launching a...

Today I’m joined by Dan Fayle, who is the co-founder of Chekkit, a company that’s he bootstrapped to almost $2.5m ARR and 20 employees. There’s a few interesting things about Dan’s story I know you’re going to like. This is his first company and he quit his job to go all-in with 3 co-founders, he got his early customers through, and I’m not kidding, door to door sales and finally he’s not changed the price of the product since it’s launch 6 years ago. What we covered in this episode: Dan’s...

Tim Soulo is the CMO at Ahrefs, one of the biggest and best SEO tools on the internet. Ahrefs are one of the clear success stories as a bootstrapped company, growing to be a an 8 figure brand over the past decade. Things really took off when Tim took over marketing for the company back in 2015, first focusing on growing the blog, before experimenting with different marketing channel to bring Ahrefs to its current size. In this episode Tim brings a mini SEO masterclass for SaaS founders, gives...

The crossover you never asked for but didn't know you wanted, it's James and his leather man. They talk about what it takes to build a leather supply business from scratch.

Louis Nicholls has dived deep into the world of newsletter referral programs, and he's learnt a thing or too along the way. This chat is packed with advice about speaking to your customers, avoiding shiny object syndrome and how to grow a newsletter.

Kyle Gawley is living his life in Thailand and making $25k p/m through his product Gravity, although it did take a near-death traumatic experience with a VC-company for him to forge a new path for his life.

Sam is the founder of Flick, a bootstrapped social media tool doing $3.5m ARR.

The dreaded (and sometimes neglected) customer research. I know I've avoided it. Michele has convinced me that it's something I should be doing and how to do it in an easy way.

Macgill Davis and Will Goto are two technical co-founders figuring out how to make you more productive with their product, Rize. They've bootstrapped the right way- with validation, conviction and cash up-front. Now onto the next stage.

Milly is truly embracing remote work, living on an island off the coast of Scotland with 170 people. From there, she's building a community of people that just haven't been thought much about before - generalists.

Dominik Sobe packed in his dreams of working as a management consultant, earning cushy money and travelling the world for free, to become a stressed-out, risk-taking indie hacker. Now with his product Helpkit making $4.5k MRR, is he happy with his new career?

Joe Masilotti is an all round top bloke. He's now just a top bloke who's making that juicy bootstrapped cash helping Rails developers get jobs. All while sneakily avoiding being labelled a recruiter. Smart man.

Geoff Roberts his co-founders at Outseta do things differently. They run a flat organisation, have ignored SEO, and have committed to 10-15 years to make the company work. They're in a super competitive and established market (CRM) but that's what they're betting on.