Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Here’s something I’ve learned building and selling a software as a service business: A well-run business is a sellable business. And while a lot of founders have grand expectations of gigantic exits, the real value lies in something much simpler—a business that’s well-structured and operates following procedures and structured plans. That structure alone is valuable. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 406 406: Making Your Business Sellable (Even If You...
5 days ago • 9 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Picture this: An engineer gets called to fix a massive industrial machine that’s been down for hours, costing the company thousands. She walks in, looks around for maybe two minutes, picks up a hammer, and gives one precise tap to a specific component. The machine roars back to life. The bill? $10,000. The company is outraged. “All you did was hit it once with a hammer! How can you charge $10,000 for that?” The engineer calmly explains: “The hammer tap was...
12 days ago • 8 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, When I started building the first prototype of Podscan, I very quickly realized this was going to be a different business than any I’d built before. That difference had everything to do with one fundamental challenge: unlike most software service businesses, the resources I would need wouldn’t scale with the number of customers I had, but would scale with something completely out of my control—the number of new podcast episodes being released worldwide...
19 days ago • 11 min read
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...
21 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 •...
26 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,...
28 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...
about 1 month 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:...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
