Episodes

I'm the guest on my own podcast! A year ago, Ben Pages joined my company, Feature Upvote, to be our marketing manager. Ben had questions about the early days of Feature Upvote, and how this product came to be. He also wanted to know the origin of my low-stress approach to running a business. We thought, why keep this conversation to ourselves? Why not record it as a podcast interview, and share it with you? And that is exactly what we did for this episode.

I chat with Maeva Cifuentes, founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing, an SEO and content marketing agency. We discuss Maeva's journey from freelance translator to CEO of a successful marketing agency. Maeva also shares with us some practical SEO tips.

My frequent guest co-host Ed Freyfogle tells us about his recent marketing endeavours, including one that was inspired by April Dunford's "toilet talk". Toilet talk, you ask? All will be revealing during this episode.

We have two guests interviewing each other! I invited two friends of the podcast, Andy Brice, and Robin Warren, to chat with each other about what it's like running a lifestyle business in 2022 compared to, say, 10 years ago. Although both Andy and Robin run what they call lifestyle businesses, they've taken different approaches, based on what they want to get out of their business.

I chat with Marc Jenkins, founder of 16by9, a small web studio that focuses on building WordPress sites. Marc and I talk about what its like to start and build up this type of company, and how, with some careful thinking, you can avoid letting your business become something you never wanted it to be.

I catch up with my frequent co-host, Ed Freyfogle, after a long summer break. Amongst other topics, we discuss how bad customer support will lose you customers. We also talk about yet more payment problems - a common theme on this podcast, and for SaaS businesses in general.

Something a bit different in this episode: we're playing an episode of the new Pushing to Production podcast, where Ed Freyfogle was the guest. It's a conversation about the technical stack Ed's product runs on. Lots of insightful discussion of the tech decisions you need to make in an API-based business.

Simon Bennett, founder of SnapShooter, returns to the show. We chat about a generous acquisition offer Simon recently received for his company - and why he ultimately decided to not to be acquired. We also chat about Simon's new podcast, Ship SaaS Faster.

An effective content strategy for your product requires getting backlinks. In this episode, I share 9 strategies I use for getting backlinks for my product's website - without doing things that make me feel dirty.

I chat with Nick Swan from SEOTesting.com. We discuss how Nick took on a co-founder for his already-established business, why Nick decided to no longer be a 1-person show, and most importantly how Nick sold a small part of his company in order to join TinySeed, a startup accelerator designed for founders who would traditionally bootstrap.

We are joined by a good friend of the podcast, Peldi Guilizzoni,  to discuss how to go about sponsoring events, newsletters, and podcasts to promote your product. In particular we talk about creative approaches that make your sponsorship stand out.

I first recorded this episode for the Business of Software podcast. I chat about the experience of attending the recent Business of Software Europe in-person event, together with Joe Leech, who was a speaker at the event.

Ed and I talk about how currency fluctuations are affecting our pricing. And we give our opinion on the recent acquisition of Postmark, a bootstrapping success story, by ActiveCampaign.

We talk about why we are switching the podcast from weekly to fortnightly for a while. We also discuss headaches when customer payments fail and what we can do to address the problem.

Ed chats with Pierre de Wulf, co-founder of ScrapingBee. Pierre tells us about the time his company almost got acquired - and how the deal fell apart at the final stage.

My co-host Ed Freyfogle chats with Brian Sierakowski, general manager of Baremetrics. Brian stepped in to manage Baremetrics after it was acquired a year or so ago from the founder.

Ed and Steve talk about a dilemma Steve is facing. An open source component heavily used by Feature Upvote has become abandoned by the maintainer, and Steve has to make a hard decision about how to deal with this.

Ed chats with John Ndege, a former bootstrapper, about how it feels no longer being one's own boss.

Ed and I chat about Ed's recent trip to London, my upcoming trip to London, the return of in-person events, and getting exposed to ideas and concepts outside of our normal channels.

I talk with Brian Casel, founder of ZipMessage, an asynchronous video messaging tool.