Elston: 00:01

You still can't log in with a password on tiny host, and we're at $10,000 MRR.

James: 00:07

Hello, and welcome back to Indie Bites, the podcast arriving new stories of fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less. Today, I'm joined by a previous guest who has been on quite the growth journey over the past few years. Elston Baretto was last on the pod in March 2021 where he'd just grown his tall tiny host to $600 MRR. And we recorded this episode as my mission to share stories of unknown indie hackers with potential. Fast forward 2 years and TinyHost has grown to 10 k MRR and Elsner's just quit his job to become a full time indie hacker.

James: 00:38

In this episode, we talk about what tactics he's used to achieve that growth, how to decide what the right time to quit is, and what he's learned along the way. Funny enough, the main driver of growth for tiny host has been SEO. And Elton has leveraged the power of today's sponsor, Ahrefs, to rank for keywords such as PDF hosting. It's safe to say without Ahrefs, Elton wouldn't have hit this 10 k milestone. So if you want to grow your tool using SEO, the first step is to head to ahrefs.com/webmastertools.

James: 01:06

That's a hrefs.com or hit the link in the show notes. Ahrefs also have a great YouTube channel where you can learn more about the SEO basics. Let's get into this chat with Elston. Elston, welcome back to your second edition of Indie Bytes. How's it feel to be back on the show?

Elston: 01:23

Amazing, especially since I'm in Canterbury.

James: 01:26

So if we look back at March, 2021, when we published that episode, you were around 600 MRR.

Elston: 01:34

Yep.

James: 01:34

What's happened since then?

Elston: 01:36

It's been a roller coaster. Literally a few weeks ago, we hit $10,000 MRR. I think by the end of that year, we hit around 1,000, and we hit $5,000 around June last year. So it was basically the point where we start to figure out our main kind of channel of growth, which ended up really becoming SEO. And, basically, we just doubled down on that.

Elston: 01:59

I think one thing that really doubled our growth was PDF hosting, And that was something which took me literally 2 days to implement part time, but then took 3 months to start ranking. And we literally rank, you know, top for PDF hosting right now, which is a bit surreal considering there's other big players in this game. But if you search PDF hosting or PDF, you know, upload, we're there, and we get ton of traffic. And I I really think it's gonna surpass HTML and zip hosting, which, you know, was our, you know, bread and butter in the day.

James: 02:31

Why did you build the PDF thing?

Elston: 02:34

That was honestly just introspective analysis. And so occasionally, I'll dip in and out and see, you know, what people are doing with it. And a lot of times I found people were uploading HTML versions of PDFs. And so what people basically what you what you're using us for is put the content online. But in order to do that, they had to go use a PDF conversion tool, get it into HTML format, and then upload that.

James: 03:00

That is one way to identify a pain point for your users. If they are going to the effort to find a way to convert a PDF into HTML, to Yossi's tiny host. But I would have thought that there's loads of ways to upload and host a PDF.

Elston: 03:16

The interesting thing is if you search PDF upload a PDF host, there are a lot of tools out there and PDF hosting is a new, but so much and so many of them are very spammy and dated, and it goes back to the same kind of philosophy I I I I basically say is if you take something that exists, was already validated, make it better, make it, you know, look more legitimate, then you got a winner on your hands. And so there's all these problems with the existing tools out there, which haven't been updated, and a lot of people have also focused on the PDF editing market. But PDF hosting still hasn't really, you know, been a thing. And people share stuff through, I guess, OneDrive and Dropbox and that kind of thing. But we take it to another level.

Elston: 03:59

You can host it against your own custom domain. You have analytics on it. We can password protect it. So we basically said, what is our version of PDF hosting? Right?

Elston: 04:08

What does that look like?

James: 04:09

So is it kinda like with Veed where they became known for subtitling despite wanting to be a fully fledged video editor. And they still very much are a fully fledged video editor. There's so many people who are coming in specifically for video editing, whereas you can host a lot more than just PDFs.

Elston: 04:28

Exactly. There are silos in our product in a in a sense where people who come to us either come for a PDF or they come for HTML. And they're different types of audience as well. Right? So some of them are web developers, students, some of them are marketing.

Elston: 04:41

So how do we expand the offering, but also really help the current users.

James: 04:47

So a lot of technical founders will be interested in finding a marketing channel like you have with SEO and learning it. But it can seem really daunting. What advice would you give to them?

Elston: 04:59

I would literally advise, like, shell out the money for a Ahrefs or Semrush or equivalent account. It can look really daunting and expensive, basically. But just spending, like, an hour just googling your keywords, and we did it today with with with your wallets. And you can find some really good keywords to to really just focus on.

James: 05:19

So what what are you looking out for in Hrefs?

Elston: 05:21

So in Hrefs, you're looking out for things where there are keyword difficulty, KD, of low teens. So something may maybe max 20, and you're looking out for where potential traffic is above a1000. Anything in that range is is very, very good. And you can build entire businesses just off there, I think.

James: 05:41

So you've stumbled into SEO. You've realized how much of a pivotal channel it is for your growth with TinyHost. Have there been any other marketing channels that you've discovered that has helped growth with TinyHost?

Elston: 05:54

YouTube has been really helpful. Not vlogs, just very, very short tutorials. These are very low production, but they get to the point for short videos where people are just searching. For example, one of our our biggest videos is how to share a PDF as a link.

James: 06:10

How simple? You you would have thought that would be online.

Elston: 06:13

Yeah. It it's got, you know, a few thousand views. We've launched it, like, a few months ago. Again, we haven't promoted it. It's just been fed through the YouTube algorithm.

Elston: 06:21

It ranks very high. And interestingly enough, we don't rank in Google for how to share a PDF as a link very high, but our video is the top video in the results. So where your web page or your blog might not rank, your video can also rank, and people kinda miss that. So it plays back into the SEO strategy in a different way because it's it's all Google's ecosystem at the end of the day. And we also have, I think, an implicit virality factor because most websites hosted on us have a end in dot tiny dot site, which link back to tiny host, and we have a embedded banner in our website as well.

James: 06:58

So for you now, at 10 k m r r, congrats. What an awesome milestone to get to. And when I last spoke to you, you were doing this fully as a side project. You were trying to build it up. Are you still doing this alongside your full time job or have you left that?

Elston: 07:12

No. I took the leap and I left my full time job at the end of last year.

James: 07:16

Congrats, man. That's awesome. Thank you.

Elston: 07:18

That's that's been a it's been a big and a long time coming.

James: 07:21

How about milestone? Did you leave?

Elston: 07:22

We I left at, around 8 k.

James: 07:25

Was that always a plan?

Elston: 07:27

Yeah. I think it was. I think it was a point where I could sustain myself, plus I was, you know, a certain point in life where I I realized that now it's an at a growth rate where it's literally a point where I need to focus on this full time or it's only ever gonna grow at this kind of stage. And the risk was very low, I think, at that point. So I never had a specific number in mind.

Elston: 07:49

I think it was something, you know, around above 5, and it's just when things lined up. And I got to the point where I was like, it's the end of the year, next year, you know, things are already opening up. Wanted to live a bit more for digital nomad live travel. But yeah. No.

Elston: 08:02

Leaving it is has been great. It's so refreshing. I've got this little sticker that says, imagine having a boss again, and I resonate with that so much. I've I've I mean, I've only been, you know, self employed for about 3 months, but I can't imagine like going back to an environment anymore.

James: 08:19

When you had your full time job and you were doing tiny host on the side and MRR was growing, what were you doing with that money? Were you just sort of putting into account, reinvesting it into tiny host sort of building a little bit of a buffer there and then when you did leave that 8 k have you started sort of replacing your salary with the money? Because what I found with my side projects I was always taking the money to myself and using it as extra income. I wasn't stashing any of it away. So when I left my job, I lost half my income.

James: 08:52

Whereas a lot of people were quite sensible and they just keep their side project money separate. And then when they leave their job, it's not like they've halved their salary.

Elston: 09:00

That's what I've been doing. I think mostly like I haven't touched I haven't taken any money out of the company personally. All the money we've used or spent has been back into the company from points of like hiring freelancers for content writing or web development and like that kind of thing.

James: 09:16

On the last episode of Indie Bites, you said something quite profound, which I think a lot of people needed to hear, which is if you leave your job to go full time on something, it doesn't necessarily mean you will have growth equivalent to the extra time you're spending. Now you've gone full time. Is that true?

Elston: 09:34

I think when when you hit a certain momentum, it is really true. Mainly because you start snowballing. Right? And so you're just stretching so many different ways. Right?

Elston: 09:45

So you've got support, you've got to you've got web development, you've got your marketing and content, you've got things just other other things like bugs and things that kind of come that come up. And also you have to devolve the product, right, in another way. So essentially, if you don't invest more time and figure out structure things well, you are just spinning in this kind of hamster wheel where you're just you're busy, but you're not moving the company forward. Right? So you're working in the business and not on the business.

Elston: 10:12

So at some point, you've gotta really step back from it or automate higher and figure out to work on the business for the next growth level.

James: 10:20

Yeah. But maybe after you've seen that traction that you need because when you're at 600 MRR, do you think that just spending more time when it would have grown it quicker?

Elston: 10:29

I I don't think at that point it would have because there was still so many unknowns. The product was very early. I think, yes, I could have gone full time on it sooner, but this is a personal decision at what point you do it. I think when you're going around the low few k's MRR, that's that's like a very good validation kind of point. So you can go into that point.

Elston: 10:49

But, again, it's it's part of the indie bootstrapping kind of, you know, culture. Right? You do, you know, you when you want and figure out when you're most comfortable and what your risk propensity is, etcetera, for that.

James: 11:00

I just noticed you've got notes here. Let me have a look at your notes. Let's see what you got. Indie Bytes, no password login.

Elston: 11:07

Yeah. This is something that'll be interesting. I think a lot of people early on think when they're building their product, they need to have this, this, this, and this feature before they can even ship and launch. You still can't log in with a password on tiny host, and we're at $10,000 MRR. That's mainly because I've been super lazy.

Elston: 11:24

Password protection is, like, quite complex kind of thing to do right and not, you know, be hacked at and restoring people's passwords. And we just use magic links. And, yes, what people have and customers have said, can you please just add password login? But not as many as you think. And, yeah, you just don't need to have it all to launch.

James: 11:42

These are really good notes. Okay. This is good. You feel pressure and on a pedestal with less room for mistakes. Do you feel like that now you've gone full time?

Elston: 11:51

Exactly. I think you're at a point when now you're living off this income. Right? It's the curse of growth. Right?

Elston: 11:57

So at the beginning, you're, like, so happy to have $1 or, like, your first customer in. Right? And now you're at this momentum where you expect 2 to 3 customers a day. SaaS is not predictable. Like, you can't look at growth on a weekly or daily basis.

Elston: 12:12

It actually happens on a monthly and also seasonality. It's like seasonal basis. So you can go days without any subscriptions, and you know that and I know that. But in your mind, it's like, oh my gosh. Is everything, like, okay?

Elston: 12:22

Is this this company just gonna disappear? Is everyone just gonna, like, disappear? Like, a 650 customer's gonna just, you know, vanish tomorrow? And in reality, it's it never happens that way. If if if a SaaS product does disappear, it's a slow degrade, and that's because of systematic kind of issue with it.

Elston: 12:40

Right? It's not an overnight kind of disappearance. So but I also now think that any strategy and any, you know, road map decisions we make, there's more gravity to them because it could go against us. Where if you when you were a few 100 users, you're like, forget it. Let's just put it out there.

Elston: 12:57

Someone uses it. Someone doesn't use it. Doesn't matter. The best businesses to really build are where you have a niche. But in Tiny's case, we're such a broad tool, and it's kind of been the philosophy from day 1 is, I think this should exist.

Elston: 13:15

I don't really know who will use it. Let's put it out there and really see what people will do with it. And from that, we've basically become the hosting solution for non technical users, which is isn't a niche, but it kind of is at the same time. But then, like, where do what nontechnical people who host things hang out? We don't really know that.

Elston: 13:35

Like, there's no community for that. There are different segments, and you see it on the website. So we are for students. We are for real estate, new marketers. We are for designers.

Elston: 13:44

We are for people who are hosting menus online. So we've got to kind of figure out, like, which and I do think there's gonna be 1 or 2 of those segments as with SEO who are really will drive revenue to the next stage. And that's, like, the big next thing I think we need to look at. It's important now, I think, for me to figure out, like, what can I outsource? What can I build as a team around?

Elston: 14:09

And what do I enjoy doing on the business? Where indie hackers at a certain level can drown is when they have, you know, business going, their customers, and there's so many different things going on, like supports, like development, bugs, and marketing that you don't enjoy what you're doing anymore. And what that means is you don't grow the company anymore because what you end up doing is maybe just going and starting something else because you get the buzz from that. So if you don't manage the growth and the business functions very well, at a certain stage, I think you will drown very easily. So, like, the stuff I was doing in the 1st few days or months of the business is not what I'm doing now anymore, and I need to get back to that happy place to really enjoy and grow to the next level.

James: 14:58

Now you've already given us 3 recommendation in the last episode, but you know I end on those 3 recommendations. So I'm gonna need some more from you, which is a book, a podcast, and an indie hacker.

Elston: 15:09

The book is Michael Lewis, who's written Liars Poker, I think it is. But he's written a tech book that not many people know about. And I don't really finish a lot of books. But the new new thing was one of the last books I read that was gripping. And it's very much anti VC in the the pre.com era.

Elston: 15:29

The podcast I would definitely recommend is Postgres FM. Very cool. New podcast by good friend of mine and from Roman Club, Michael. And indie hack I'd say you should follow is I met a couple of really cool Portuguese founders when I was in Portugal last year, and they've launched a platform called Vetted, which is a marketplace for marketing professionals.

James: 15:51

Elsa Baretta, thank you so much for coming back onto Indie Bytes. Thank

Elston: 15:54

you for having me in Canterbury. It's been a really great day.

James: 15:57

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bytes. Time for a few quick plugs. Don't forget to check out today's sponsor, Ahrefs, the best tool for growing your business using SEO. Want to upgrade your wallet? Check out my hand weight wallet brand, WhistlercraftCo.

James: 16:10

Or if you're interested in hearing about my own indie hacker journey, my other podcast, This Indie Life might be for you. All links are in the show notes as always. See you in the next episode.