James McKinven
Host of the Indie Bites podcast & founder of PodPanda.
Appears in 58 Episodes
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...
From $0 to $10k MRR in 2 years - Elston Baretto, Tiiny Host (Revisited)
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 unkn...
Making $12k p/m with Wordpress plugins - Patrick Posner
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...
From $50m VC-backed to $20k MRR notes app - Alex MacCaw, Reflect (prev. Clearbit)
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 comp...
Stair stepping to millions in SaaS revenue - Craig Hewitt, Castos
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 podcastin...
Daniel Fayle: from commercial banker to making millions in software
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 thing...
How Ahrefs Built A Best-In-Class SEO Strategy - Tim Soulo, Ahrefs
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 t...
Bootstrapping a leather supply business to $50k in sales - Jared Maddern, Beamhouse Leather
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 scr...
How to build a newsletter business - Louis Nicholls, SparkLoop
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 speak...
Near death VC experience to $25k p/m bootstrapped - Kyle Gawley, Gravity
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 fo...
Bootstrapping to $3.5m ARR from YouTuber to Founder - Sam King, Flick
Sam is the founder of Flick, a bootstrapped social media tool doing $3.5m ARR.
A masterclass in customer research as a founder - Michele Hansen, Deploy Empathy
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 ...
Bootstrapping, AppSumo deals and productivity tools - Macgill Davis / Will Goto, Rize.io
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- wi...
Building a community of generalists on a remote island - Milly Tamati, Generalist World
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...
Bootstrapping Helpkit to $4.5k MRR - Dominik Sobe, Helpkit
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 i...
Solo founder grows reverse job board to $100k a year - Joe Masilotti, RailsDevs
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 avoi...
Ending the VC dream and pivoting to an indie company - David Kofoed Wind, Eduflow
David wanted his startup, Peergrade, to be the next big thing in education. He went about it by raising VC funding. But as indies we know this story rarely ends well. ...
Bootstrapping Transistor.fm to 13,000+ podcasts - Justin Jackson, Transistor.fm
Justin Jackson is the co-founder of Transistor.fm, a successful bootstrapped podcast hosting company. The journey building Transistor were documented on the Build Your...
Indie Bites Trailer - what's it all about?
Welcome to Indie Bites. This podcast will bring you short, bite-sized conversations (no more than 15 minutes) with indie hackers that have started small, profitable an...