James McKinven

James McKinven

Host of the Indie Bites podcast & founder of PodPanda.

Appears in 48 Episodes

Bouncing back from losing 70% revenue - Max Serrano, IGotAnOffer

Max Serrano is the founder of IGotAnOffer, a bootstrapped coaching platform focused on helping people get jobs and progress their career. Initially starting out in con...

Building and monetizing an audience as a software engineer - Randall Kanna Franson

Today I’m joined by Randall Kanna Franson. Randall is a senior software engineer who has written 3 books, including one published by O’Reilly and a self published one ...

Can you really scale a No Code SaaS? - Kieran Ball, NoCodeLife

Kieran Ball is the founder of NoCodeLife, a selection of case studies of those making successful businesses using NoCode. Kieran also has courses on how to become a No...

B2C vs B2B SaaS as an indie hacker - Val Sopi, Blogstatic

Today I’m joined by Val Sopi, the founder of Blogstatic, a lightweight blogging platform built to take on the likes of Ghost. Currently Val is sitting around $1k a mon...

How VEED bootstrapped to $7m ARR - Sabba Keynejad, VEED.io (2020)

Today I'm revisiting one of my favourite episodes, from 2020, with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder and CEO of VEED.io, an online video editing platform. When I interviewed ...

Lemon Squeezy CTO on why he still makes side projects - Gilbert Pellegrom

Gilbert Pellegrom, is co-founder and CTO of Lemon Squeezy, a platform for selling software and digital products online. Previously Gilbert created the Nivo Slider all ...

Scaling and exiting a $65k MRR with meal planning app - Jeffrey Bunn, Mealime & Clearful

Today I’m joined by Jeffrey Bunn, who is the co-founder of Clearful, a digital journal app he built with his wife, Maria. Previously they co-founded Mealime, a meal pl...

The slow and steady path to growth - Michael Christofides

Today I’m joined by Michael Christofides, who is the founder of PgMustard, a product which helps people speed up Postgres queries. Michael started out working for a De...

Arvid Kahl on side projects, hobbies and making money as a founder

Arvid Kahl runs The Bootstrapped Founder, a podcast, newsletter and educational resource to help founders grow successful bootstrapped businesses. He’s also written tw...

Quitting his job and taking a £20k loan to go full time indie - Harvey Carpenter, Growform

Harvey Carpenter is the founder of Growform, a form builder which is now around 7K MRR. It's a mixture of enterprise and some other clients, and he's tackling a produc...

How to get to ramen profitability - Charlie Ward, Ramen Club

Today is a special episode, because it marks 100 episodes of Indie Bites. And to mark the occasion, I’m bringing back my guest from episode 1, Charlie Ward, founder of...

Bootstrapping EmailOctopus to $3m+ ARR - Jonathan Bull & Tom Evans

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 bee...

Building a financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson

In this episode I have a returning guest, someone who is a keystone of the bootstrapping community, it’s Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor, MegaMaker and more. ...

Rob Walling on multiple projects, why building an audience is dumb and other SaaS wisdom

Rob Walling is an absolute legend in the bootstrapping and indie scene. He’s a veteran entrepreneur with his most notable exit being Drip in 2016. Rob also founded Mic...

Growing an audience, making difficult decisions and launching screencasting.com - Aaron Francis

Aaron Francis is currently an Educator at Planet Scale, but you would have seen him all around the internet doing courses, YouTube videos, podcasts and more. Notably h...

$20k MRR with Airtable app using YouTube and SEO for growth - Andy Cloke, Data Fetcher

Today I’m joined by a returning guest, Andy Cloke, who runs Data Fetcher. Data Fetcher is an API plugin for Airtable that he’s grown to 20k MRR. In our previous episod...

Making $200k a year teaching Google Sheets - Andrew Kamphey

Today I’m joined by Andrew Kamphey, who is the founder of Better Sheets, a platform of tools and tutorials to get better at using Google Sheets, that has done well ove...

Bootstrapping Ticket Tailor to £6m ARR, selling and repurchasing the company, losing motivation and more - Jonny White

Jonny White is the founder of Ticket Tailor, a platform for selling tickets online doing over £6m ARR and growing. Jonny founded Ticket Tailor in 2011, grew it to £2k ...

Carving a new life path with a newsletter about Workspaces - Ryan Gilbert, Workspaces

Ryan Gilbert is the creator of the Workspaces newsletter, which showcases the best workspaces in tech and beyond. He grew it to 6,000 subscribers and $2k per month wit...

Taking on Bit.ly bootstrapped - Tim Leland, T.LY

Tim Leland is the founder of T.LY, a link shortener with almost half a million users that he recently quit his job to pursue full time. Tim started out building chrome...

Working towards life-changing outcomes as an indie hacker - Colleen Schnettler, HelloQuery

In this episode I’m joined by Colleen Schnettler, which a lot of you would have heard from through her Software Social podcast she co-hosts with Michele Hansen. Collee...

Gamifying products, shipping quickly and knowing when to quit - Marc Louvion

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 ...

Is indie hacking having an identity crisis? - Dominic Monn, MentorCruise

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 ...

How to find and validate your ideas - Bram Kanstein, Startup Stash / No Code MVP

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 c...

Growing Frontend Mentor to 500k users and $30k MRR - Matt Studdert

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 h...

Jordan O'Connor on running a $30k MRR SaaS and doing SEO consulting on the side

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’...

Growing a $2m p/y indie business - Josh Ho, Referral Rock

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 manag...

Building a 6-figure creator business - Jay Clouse, Creator Science

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 bootstrapp...

Building a $15k MRR side project while working at Stripe - Justin Duke, Buttondown

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...

Breaking Convention: The Radical Thinking of Jack McDade and Statamic

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, t...

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