Growing Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling to Github - Grey Baker, Dependabot

Grey Baker is the co-founder of Dependabot, which is a bot that makes it easy for developers to keep the third party dependencies up to date, which grew to $14k MRR before being acquired by Github in 2019. Grey’s story is a long an interesting one, so there is an extended version of this podcast available on the indie feast membership. But the best bits are here about he started out at McKinsey, before being a pivotal early employee at London FinTech GoCardless, to then cycling around the world and then coming back to accidentally launch Dependabot.

👉 Extended version available on the Indie Feast membership here.

What we covered in this episode

• Landing a gig at consulting firm, McKinsey
• Learning how to code in 6 months
• Joining VC-backed GoCardless as employee 6
• Growing GoCardless to 100 employees
• Why Grey left after 4.5 years
• Cycling around the world
• Eating a petrol-ey snickers bar
• Starting Dependabot as a side project
• A failed launch
• Doing things that don't scale
• The growth inflection point - GitHub marketplace
• Advice for bootstrappers

Recommendations

• Book: The Design of Everyday Things
• Podcast: N/A
• Indie Hacker: Pete Hamilton

Follow Grey

• Twitter

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website
• Buy A Wallet
• 2 Hour Podcast Course
• PodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

Sponsor - Tiiny Host

Tiiny Host is the simplest way to host and share your web project online. It's loved by thousands of freelancers, agencies & developers across the world to quickly upload demos, landing pages or websites. Just drag & drop your web files or even a PDF to share it with the world in seconds. 

👉 Try it here