Indie Bites Mental health as a founder and the importance of community - Tom Ross, Design Cuts
In this episode we’re joined by Tom Ross, who is the founder of Design Cuts, a marketplace and community for creatives which he’s grown to a team of 20 over the past decade. Tom is also a seasoned podcaster, co-hosting The Honest Designer's Show and Biz Buds which have been downloaded millions of times.
It's not all been plain sailing for Tom as he ran into severe burnout working 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 18 months, leading to him being hospitalised. In this episode we're going to find out more about Tom's story, some of his successes and failures in business, along advice he'd give to founders from his experiences.
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What we covered in this episode:
- Tom’s backstory
- Starting an Interpol forum
- Earning more money at home at 16 than in his job
- Growing a design blog to 15 million visitors
- Growing Design Cuts in the early days
- 10 years later, 20 employees, millions of revenue
- Mental health and burnout as a founder
- How to build good routines to avoid burnout
- How community can help with your mental health
- Why community is so important
- How to build a community
Recommendations
- Book: Thank You Economy by Gary Vee
- Podcast: Diary of a CEO
- Indie Hacker: Rosie Sherry
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Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
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