Growing to $4m+ despite Apple cloning their product - Matt Ronge, Astropad
A conversation with Matt Ronge, co-founder and CEO of Astropad.
Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad, a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, Matt has been on quite the journey with Astropad and we’re going to dive into all of that today, along with a mini-masterclass on PR.
What we covered in this episode:
What we covered in this episode:
- Origins of Astropad
- Having two technical co-founders
- How they tackled marketing with no prior knowledge
- Most useful books to learn the basics
- How Matt leveraged PR in the early days
- How indie hackers can use PR for their projects
- Size of Astropad in 2022
- Why they built a hardware product
- How to get into building hardware
- The benefits of hardware products
- How Apple stole their product
- How they saved their business after being crushed by Apple
Recommendations
- Book: Radical Candour, The Making of a Manager
- Podcast: Dithering
- Indie Hacker: Monica Lent
Follow Matt
Follow Me
Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.
