Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Last week, I read a tweet by Channing Allen, one of the co-founders of IndieHackers, about the term “second brain.” He was saying how it was kind of crazy that just a couple years ago, folks were publishing bestselling books on the brilliance of spending hours a day doing manual data entry into spreadsheet apps like Notion and calling these “brains.” And over the last couple years, we’ve developed completely new technology for this with large language...
10 days ago • 12 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Today I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately – and probably yours too if you’re building anything with AI. It’s the age-old question: should you run language models locally or just use APIs? Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Arvid, Local AI vs APIs been debated to death.” But here’s the thing – most of these conversations happen in a vacuum, full of theoretical scenarios and benchmark comparisons. What I want to share today is what...
17 days ago • 6 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, After about a year of building Podscan.fm, my podcast platform and social monitoring tool, I’ve finally reached that general area of profitability. It’s that break-even moment that every founder aims for, and now I’m at a point where I really need to focus on things besides building the product. Why? Because the product is clear. The value proposition is fairly clear. I know who my customers are, and I know how to talk to them. Now, what I should be...
24 days ago • 7 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, One thing that I really struggle with is communicating clearly to my prospective customers what the value of the product is for them. There are several reasons why this is the case. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 388 388: The Job To Be Done: Understanding Customer Value Communication 11:44 MORE INFO I'm building a product that is both a podcast database and a podcast alerting system and a podcast forecasting or trend analysis system and an API product,...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, On April 30th, I'll join Paddle CMO Andrew Davies and my friend KP in a webinar named "From idea to exit: Lessons from SaaS founders who’ve done it" — please join us there, for free. I had this really interesting experience with a customer of Podscan recently. They reached out saying they were having trouble integrating our API. Now, this wasn’t unusual - we get these requests occasionally. But what happened next completely changed my perspective. THE...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, So Podscan itself is doing pretty well. It has grown from an experiment into something substantial. It’s profitable now and has customers of all sorts that I didn’t even expect to serve in the beginning. With every week, I shift closer to the perfect messaging, reaching the right people at the right time. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 386 386: One Year of Podscan: Reflecting on Tech & Business Decisions 24:23 MORE INFO What I want to share with you...
about 2 months ago • 11 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I’ve been running into an interesting challenge in the last few days with Podscan. I have to make a choice that is both technically feasible, scalable, and balanced—a balance between giving my trial customers precisely what they want and being able to keep my business profitable. Let me walk you through this situation because I think it perfectly illustrates the kinds of decisions we, as founders, have to make all the time. This issue is sponsored by my...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog 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. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 384 Podscan's Profitability Milestone: What's Next? 21:21 MORE INFO Over the last several months, I’ve slowly but surely ramped up...
about 2 months ago • 13 min read
Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Coming out of MicroConf, I’ve gained clarity about something I’ve been feeling for a while. It’s time to reposition Podscan.fm, shifting away from alerting and monitoring as main features, and moving more decisively toward what it’s already becoming: a comprehensive podcast database. THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDER • EPISODE 383 383: Repositioning Podscan: From Monitoring to Data Platform 18:45 MORE INFO This isn’t just a cosmetic change. It’s a genuine pivot in...
2 months ago • 7 min read
