Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Amar Ghose has been growing Zenmaid from idea to market leader as a non-technical founder. Zenmaid is a SaaS platform that's been helping maid service owners grow their businesses since 2013. Amar is one of those amazing founders who truly embodies the bootstrapping spirit—when his co-founder left early on at just $15k in monthly revenue, he could have easily given up. Instead, he stuck with it, and through relentless customer focus and persistence, he's...
2 days ago • 2 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Over the last 18 months, I’ve been building Podscan, a business that processes millions of podcast episodes every day—tens of thousands of new episodes daily, with 33 million episodes now in our database. We transcribe everything and do AI-based analysis, search, and mention tracking for brands and marketers. And here’s what I’ve learned: the success stories in podcasting happen despite the infrastructure, not because of it. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER •...
7 days ago • 8 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Vova Feldman is the founder of Freemius, a Merchant of Record payment provider. He's been at it for a while, and it wasn't always easy. Vova shares his approach to weathering the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, how to build a team (and mis-hires), and what operating in the payment industry means for a crafty founder. Enjoy! THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 401 401: Vova Feldman — Mastering Entrepreneurship in the Payments Sector 41:13 MORE INFO Oh,...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I just had one of those realizations that makes you stop and think differently about everything we’ve been discussing around AI tools. You know, we talk a lot about AI helping us build things faster, about automation, about whether it’s going to replace developers. But there’s a side effect happening right now that I think is either completely undervalued or just not being observed at all. And honestly? It might be more transformative than the automation...
14 days ago • 7 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Shane Rosenthal and Simon Hamp from the NativePHP Project have brought PHP, and with it my favorite web framework Laravel, onto Mobile devices. I love this: taking established tech and porting it into places where you wouldn’t expect. I’m talking to Share and Simon about how they accomplished this, and, maybe even more impressively, how they turned this into a profitable business at a very early stage. Enjoy! THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 399 399:...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Here’s a story that every founder needs to hear, because it reveals something fundamental about markets, competition, and the hidden costs of being first. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 398 The Hidden Cost of Being First 11:54 MORE INFO In the world of Python programming, there’s been a tool called pip that has dominated package installation for years. pip has been the de facto way to install Python packages through all the many different versions of...
21 days ago • 7 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I’ve been talking a lot about Podscan and the positive developments—the improvements, the good things that have happened to the company and to me over the last year and a half since I started this journey. But building in public is about sharing the ups and the downs, the wild joy ride and roller coaster that is entrepreneurship. And it’s time to share the not-so-happy parts of this business. Recently, I announced that Podscan was profitable. And it...
28 days ago • 10 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Jack Friks (@jackfriks) is the founder of PostBridge, a social media scheduling tool that grew from his own frustration with spending hours posting across platforms to a $18k/month business. We explore the evolution of social media toward authenticity, the challenges of building lean products as a solopreneur, and how to navigate the noise while maintaining a genuine human connection in an AI-driven world. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 396 396: Jack...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, If you're into PHP, Laravel, and how Taylor Otwell turned an open-source framework into a thriving multi-million dollar empire, check out this week's interview episode of my podcast! There’s something deeply unsettling about being dramatically more productive while feeling like you’re barely working. That’s the strange dichotomy I find myself in every day now with AI-assisted coding. My output has multiplied significantly over the last few months, yet I...
about 1 month ago • 11 min read