Episodes

We argue for and against having a monthly email newsletter for your product. Ed is firmly in the "No way" corner. Steve represents the "You gotta have a newsletter" side. Let the debate begin!

Ed and I cover a lot of ground this week: nerves, geo-trivia as marketing, a brief foray into geopolitics, using Twitter for marketing, the frustrating unpredictability of what marketing efforts will bear fruit, the pleasure of working from home, and dealing with zombie customers.

Ed and Steve talk about the mental stress of having real-time business metrics, how to find a business mentor, and Steve's attempt to get started with enterprise sales.

Allan Jardine is the creator of DataTables, a popular jQuery plugin. We discuss his challenges and successes as he learned how to make a viable business from creating Open Source software.

In this episode I answer some listener questions about freelancers. I discuss how to find, hire, and communicate with freelancers.

Ed grills me on my progress with Saber Feedback, my B2B SaaS, nine months after I acquired it. We talk about SEO, competitors, getting backlinks, finding a niche, and resisting the temptation to write code instead of doing marketing.

Ed and I discuss what we want to achieve in 2021. Last year, unexpected world events turned our "goals for 2020" upside-down. Having learnt no lesson whatsoever from this, we fearlessly enter 2021 with plans!

Steve and Ed look back at the goals they set for 2020 at the beginning of the year. What goals did we hit? What goals eluded us? What did we learn along the way?

This is a talk I recently gave at Barcelona's ESIC business school. Ostensibly, I spoke on working with intangibles as products. But actually, I told the story of how I started as a bootstrapper - and revealed how clueless I was at the beginning.

Liz is an expert in onboarding email sequences. Over the course of this episode, Liz helps me design a great email sequence for Saber Feedback.

Ed and Steve talk about recent challenges and successes in their bootstrapped SaaS businesses. Ed tells of the agony of doing enterprise sales. Steve admits to  self-doubt when waiting for SEO results.

Moritz Dausinger, founder of refiner.io, chats about his success as a serial founder of bootstrapped SaaS products. He founded and sold two B2B SaaS apps, and now he's doing it a third time.

Ed and Steve discuss the endless burden of busy-work that comes with running a business - and how we try to minimise it.

Discounts, discounts, discounts! Ed and I discuss how we respond to customers asking for discounts, whether we should offer Cyber Monday offers, and how offering discounts can hurt future sales.

Alex runs a successful help desk software company with only 3 employees, competing in a crowded market.

Robin Warren of Corrello tells me how he finds and recruits freelance developers for his bootstrapped software company.

I seek Ed’s advice on some Saber Feedback stuff. We talk about pricing, free plans, legacy framework woes, and database hosting.

Ed and I discuss knowledge sharing for bootstrappers, and even for one-person teams. How do you make sure the important knowledge for your business gets remembered, shared, and used?

I answer several questions from a loyal listener who wants advice on building a B2B SaaS similar in scope and style to my product, Feature Upvote.

Robert Brandl of ToolTester Network built his company by developing excellent SEO skills. In this episode he turns his skills to Saber Feedback, and gives me awesome advice on how to solve my SEO problems.