Dear founder,
It is the beginning of April 2025—it’s been almost a year to the day that Podscan got its bootstrapper-compatible funding, and it has taken me this long to reach the very first goal that I set for myself that day: becoming profitable before the funds ran out. And that goal has been reached.
Over the last several months, I’ve slowly but surely ramped up revenue, generated customers, had them stick around, and made Podscan profitable. That is a massive accomplishment. It’s something that I thought would happen much faster than it did, but it has happened. It’s taken a year to get to this point.
Even though I’m very happy to now be in a phase where the runway is not shrinking but very slowly—significantly—increasing, I’m now faced with having to find the next goal for myself and making a couple of choices about what Podscan is right now, what it should be in the near future, and what the ultimate strategy for the business is going to be.
Every single software business—be it an indie hacker business or a small team of founders bootstrapped or having some kind of funding to help you reach profitability—has profitability as its first goal. It’s a very important, almost critical target: to be self-sustaining. Only once that part of the business journey is reached can you then comfortably and reasonably make choices about the future.
Everything leading up to this is just survival: trying to figure things out, finding product-market fit, getting to the point where you create traction with customers, reducing the initial churn to a manageable rate, figuring out how to find new customers, positioning—all the things that I’ve been doing over the last couple of months that I’ve been trying to share publicly. All of these experiments, all of these small bets that I made (some paid off, some didn’t)—all of these worked in tandem to get me to profitability within a year.
So now the question is: where do we go from here?
I’ll use this opportunity to freely and honestly talk about my personal relationship with the business, with the industry, and with the customers that I have. I’ll discuss what plans might happen, what options I have, and what I’m leaning towards. All of these things change over time, obviously. New situations come up, offers come in, collaborations start to happen, and things shift. But at this point in time—maybe also as a little time capsule for Podscan a year from now, two years from now, five years from now—I’m taking inventory of the options that I see and the strategies I’m interested in pursuing.
The Acquisition Path
If you’ve listened to prior episodes of this podcast, you’ll know that I’ve built and sold SaaS businesses in the past. I’m not new to the idea of building something to be acquired. That is definitely one of the major options.
Even in talking to people at the MicroConf conference a couple weeks ago in New Orleans, I found that everybody has this as an option. Everyone there has acquisition on the table as a potential way to set a goal for their business: make it acquirable, make it acquired, have a trajectory towards acquisition where the founder gets rich and the business finds a new home but keeps running—either gets integrated into something else or gets run by other people.
That’s really what acquisition is: handing over your business to somebody to do with it as they want. It could be a financial acquisition where they keep it running and make money off it, or it could be a strategic acquisition where people get access to your data, your customers, or even your employees—or you as a founder.
This option is a legitimate one and very present with me because the first meaningful acquisition that happened to me was so substantial that it freed me from having to work for somebody else. That acquisition allowed me to do whatever I want and build things that I want.
You’re experiencing the consequence of this: you’re reading my newsletter, listening to my podcast, watching my YouTube channel, seeing my Twitter presence. All of this is a consequence of me not having to do anything else for anybody.
And Podscan is a different consequence, but also one where I got to build a new business completely on my own, completely as I wanted it to be, in the market that I care about—podcasting. There’s a lot of freedom I’ve developed throughout the last five years in being able to do whatever I wanted to do. Many things happened to me and for me that gave me the opportunity to build Podscan, and the connections I made allowed me to find funding to get it going—to finance it for a year so I could find profitability in a market that is slow to adapt to technology and expensive to serve due to the necessity of AI.
I pay a lot of money to AI processing tools and GPU-capable servers to run AI systems on, which made it hard to get to profitability because it’s expensive. So in my position, another acquisition is definitely on the table. If Podscan gets a high six or low seven figure valuation at some point, a couple million dollars is always helpful, right? That would create a financial situation where the profitability of a business may not be as important to me anymore, or where having to run a business doesn’t feel as much like an obligation and more like a pastime.
For me to make Podscan incredibly sellable—which is one of the big tenets of being acquired—it needs to be not just valuable but also transferable. This is why most agencies or founder brands don’t really get acquired; they get collaborated with or invested into, but not acquired. If the founder is the product, like Mr. Beast for example, they won’t be bought and renamed. You either invest in them or make money off them, but you’re not going to own them.
If you want to sell a business completely—get a couple million dollars and hand everything over, just like we did when we sold FeedbackPanda back in 2019—you have to make it completely transferable and completely decoupled from the founder. In Podscan’s case, I believe it’s already there, other than the fact that I manage the customer service chat and handle sales exchanges through email. None of this is completely bound to me; all of it could be done by somebody else.
One of the big benefits of going to MicroConf was figuring out that every founder secretly wants to sell. A lot of founders there had interesting acquisition deals on the table and were just thinking, “Should we? Should we not?” It’s a very interesting state to be in, and I want to get to that point with Podscan—where people want to acquire it for a significant amount of money.
I think it’s already there in terms of stability. When I spent a week in New Orleans, I didn’t do anything for the business. I think I answered two or three customer service conversations, and none of them were critical. The software just kept running; it was useful. It created thousands of dollars of revenue throughout the week I was away. That’s pretty amazing—it’s very stable, reliable, and didn’t need any hand-holding from me.
That’s a sellable business already. There is some infrastructure work that needs to be done, maybe streamlining or optimization, but it’s now a profitable business that runs on well-documented systems. It doesn’t have catastrophic failures, and even if there are problems, I’ve tried to document everything from the beginning to be able to deal with issues as they arise.
Since all the technology I use (with a couple of exceptions mostly related to AI platforms for data extraction) is self-contained, if nothing changes, it will keep working all by itself. So it’s already pretty sellable in that regard.
The question is: How valuable is the product? How valuable is the business? And who would be interested in buying it?
For being acquired, everything is set up: all my accounts are decoupled, nothing personal is in there, and there is a full business entity around it. Podscan is acquirable. So all I need to do now to make an acquisition more interesting is to make the product or the business itself more valuable by adding more revenue, creating business opportunities, and increasing the overall value—not just of the customer base that I have, but also of the data in my database.
At this point, that’s 27 million transcribed podcast episodes and 3.7 million podcasts that are constantly tracked. As I recently integrated both topic and theme tracking, as well as entity tracking (people, brands, institutions, companies, organizations), those database items are growing every day. The interconnected structure of the data in Podscan is expanding, making the data itself more valuable.
That would make for a massive strategic acquisition—somebody could buy the Podscan database and even get rid of the business if they wanted to, for a lot of money, because the data we’ve tracked, cleaned, and connected is itself massively valuable. Or obviously the business, the API platform, the monitoring system—all of these could be interesting targets.
Growing a Team
Another option is to just keep running the business and turn it into a company of a certain size. That’s also appealing to me, particularly because it’s running all by itself without requiring much intervention.
The last time I was at this stage where the business was sellable, I was also really burned out. I was constantly trying to keep up with some external API that we integrated with, dealing with their unpredictable schedule of changes that we couldn’t preempt but always had to react to and fix. That was very stressful.
But I’m not in a situation like that at all now. All of the services I use that are potentially shaky, where APIs might change—I use AI systems to extract data from them. I don’t have to understand the specifics of the responses; they can change and AI will still find the right data for me.
This is really new and novel—it’s Postel’s law, the robustness principle: send restricted, highly formatted data, but be capable of receiving all kinds of data in all kinds of formats and turn it into something usable. I think that’s what AI systems really facilitate in terms of interoperability between systems.
There’s always room for error because of that interpretation layer, but for a solo founder, I would rather have 1% of my data be slightly weird than having 100% of the data be correct but if any tiny thing changes, 0% of the data works. That feels like a fair exchange.
So I could just keep building this business. In terms of the data that I ingest, there’s not much more to do. I already fetch almost everything I can from every podcast, and they don’t make more podcasts all of a sudden—it’s a very linear data input.
Of course, customer expectations change, and with the size of the data, infrastructure requirements change over time. But I could hire for that. I could find somebody to deal with the complexity of this database and build systems that are still snappy and reliable for bigger customers and more usage.
I could easily do that—build a business where it could be completely remote. I wouldn’t need anybody in an office because it’s all work on data, which is very technical and doesn’t require much person-to-person interaction. It just needs a lot of specific thinking and work.
I could keep building Podscan as a business, keep owning it, and start at some point to derive some kind of compatible salary and dividends, and just keep reinvesting into the development and adjustment of better and more reliable technologies. I could see doing this for a couple more years, for sure.
The Middle Path
The third option would be to get Podscan to maybe $50,000 MRR or $100,000 MRR—just make it a million in ARR—and keep it there, relatively independent, relatively solo. Just hire people for jobs on and off, here and there, and have it as a constant income stream.
That feels like the boring version, the unaspirational one, because either acquisition or a bigger team means bigger business, bigger numbers, bigger valuations. But it could well just be a small business very specifically focused on providing one particular product, which is a data product at this point.
This doesn’t interest me as much. I’m at a point where the solo work on Podscan feels a bit exhausting. I still derive a lot of joy and curiosity from doing the work, but I kind of want to share this with more people and see what others can come up with—to build really cool stuff that is useful to the people who use Podscan, who are interested in data from podcasts.
Keeping it solo, keeping it all on my shoulders, isn’t really conducive to exploratory and fun product work—we need different perspectives, a diversity of thought situation.
So out of the three options I see before myself, keeping it as a solo business is the least interesting one. It’s also the one where I need to change the least, so it’s the default until one of the other two happens.
But I have a feeling that Podscan can be a nice mid-sized company, maybe smallish, with a couple dozen employees dealing with a relatively limited amount of incoming data, a manageable (if complicated) data production pipeline, and as it grows, a more sophisticated data distribution pipeline.
That’s what I’m noticing with the customers that are skyrocketing my MRR at this point—they have high data needs, high needs for quality data, for reliable data, for comprehensive data that includes everything. For that to be scaled, there needs to be some smart architecture that exceeds the capacities of the current system in terms of automation. I’ve set it up in a way that will work for now, for the next 10 or 100 customers, but to make this truly scalable, we need somebody who understands data at scale better than I do. I can get there, but somebody else is already there, and I can pay them to bring the expertise to the business.
The Next Goal
So acquisition is always on the horizon (and hey, if you have a serious seven-figure offer for Podscan, send me an email). But until then, I’ll keep it solo for maybe the next couple months to stabilize and deal with the customer pivot that has increased my revenue this much—turn this into a process that is more reliable and repeatable—then slowly but necessarily grow the team through part-time work and freelance work at first, and then actually turn this into a multi-person business.
I guess that’s the strategic outlook for Podscan in early 2025, just after having reached profitability and getting into a state where the product is stable, the product is used 24/7, and has opportunities for growth and scale that I still need to discover.
It is looking pretty good—half a year ago, this would have been a dream state to be in. Now that I’m here, it’s like, “Okay, we reached this goal. Let’s set the next one.”
With all these options—keeping it to myself, growing a team, and selling the business—there needs to be a next goal for me. I think that goal has to be both a monetary goal, like an MRR goal, and also a hiring goal. Because either way, acquired or not, I need to start offloading development, particularly infrastructure work, and have somebody help me build the system that can serve bigger customers with more data requirements.
My next MRR goal would be being able to pay a qualified data engineer or a developer with an infrastructure background that can help me build scalable data pipelines and systems to export massive terabytes of podcast data to customers reliably, on time, in real time, and in massive data lake deployments. For that, I probably want to get to $15,000 MRR to pay for all the infrastructure, the business expenses, plus a well-paid full-time or part-time engineer. Let’s say 15 to $20,000 MRR, but I have to hit 15 first.
I’m so happy and joyful that Podscan is panning out to be profitable and a tool that people actually like to use. I’ve been talking to several customers over the last couple days, and the conversations have been overwhelmingly positive, both verifying and validating that people need insight into the podcasting world and that Podscan is a solution they like.
The other solutions out there are quite expensive, mostly because they come with all kinds of bells and whistles as part of complicated software suites that don’t appeal to people who want to build something on top of them. Or they’re aimed at agencies that don’t want complicated software—they want easy and highly automatable software.
Having this data platform that is very data and automation-centric has been a big benefit for Podscan. And me being present in the conversations and sharing my interest in podcasts and my delight in building tools to help people has also been very helpful to build these initial relationships with customers.
I have yet to be yelled at for anything, and even if somebody comes to Podscan who’s not an ideal customer and is kind of frustrated with why it’s not for them, the conversation usually turns them into somebody who’s like, “Okay, this is not for me, but the founder is great, the company is great, I might recommend this to somebody who this might be for.”
The conversations have all been very positive and useful. So that’s where I’m going. Next goal is set. Let’s see how quickly we can accomplish this.
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