Today I’m joined by Tom Evans and Jonathan Bull from EmailOctopus, an email platform who have bootstrapped to over $3m ARR since they were founded in 2014. They’ve been battling in a crowded and competitive market, with some huge funded companies to contend with, but they’ve made it work in an indie way. In this episode we talk about how they lost 99% of their users overnight, why they’ve chosen to compete on price rather than in a niche and their reasoning behind staying bootstrapped for so long.

Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

00:00 Intro
01:24 EmailOctopus Background
02:57 How long did EmailOctopus take to build?
03:09 Launching for free
05:45 Tom joining EmailOctopus
07:11 Growth
07:48 Building in a crowded market
08:55 Differentiating on price
11:30 Raising vs bootstrapping
12:58 Changing goals as a bootstrapper
15:07 Fulfilling the side project urge

Recommendations

Book: ReWork, Four Thousand Weeks
Podcast: The Rest is Politics, Indie Bites
Indie Hacker: Pieter Levels, Jeffrey Bunn

Guest Links

My links

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny.

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