Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I was reading Brandon Sanderson’s latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: “A stronger current makes for stronger fish.” That’s it. That’s what entrepreneurship is. We’re constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish—the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create—or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They...
7 days ago • 11 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I think we’re at the precipice of a pretty significant change in how we build software products. Obviously, the recent ascent of vibe coding and all the agentic coding tools that we find very useful and highly effective shows a difference in how we approach building products. But there’s another change - not just in how we build, but in who these products are for. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 410 410: Building for the Age of AI Consumers 23:34 MORE...
14 days ago • 11 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, James Phoenix is an expert in agentic coding, particularly Claude code, a tool that I have been using to great effect over the last couple months. I chatted with James just a couple days ago and have implemented several of the tips that he gave me during a conversation, and I'm already almost twice as effective at using this already magically effective tool. So I don't think I can overpromise how much insight into well-structured and highly optimized...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I recently executed a successful marketing project within my software business that turned out to be so successful that it spawned a business built on top of that business. And when this episode is released, it’ll be one day since the platform has been live, so I’ll be sharing the most raw and most timely insight into what happened, what the story is, how it happened, and how I went about building this particular project. This issue is sponsored by...
21 days ago • 13 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Nick Groeneveld is a designer and User Experience expert who has been a valued collaborator on Podscan, my own software product. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 407 407: Nick Groeneveld — Exploring AI's Impact on Modern Design 49:39 MORE INFO Nick works as a freelancer for a lot of companies that have no in-house design knowledge, and he's been navigating the rapid changes that AI tools like Lovable and vZero are bringing to the design world. With 10...
23 days ago • 1 min read
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...
28 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
