In 2003, David Houser and his co-founder CMAX started Grasshopper, and thus began their journey in bootstrapping a business that would go on to generate $30 million a year in revenue.

I'm Cortland Allen, and I've interviewed a lot of founders for NDHackers.com.

But none who've achieved that level of success, especially without raising any money whatsoever

from venture capitalists. In this conversation with David, I really wanted to pick his brain

about the kinds of things that early stage founders and aspiring entrepreneurs could do

to raise their chances of building a hugely successful

business like he did.

We talked about everything from coming up with a solid initial business idea and how to

find your customers in places where nobody else is looking to managing your work-life balance

art, as he calls it, your work-life integration.

David has a ton of insightful knowledge to share, and I know you guys are going to enjoy

this interview and learn a lot.

So I present to you, David Houser, the founder of Grasshopper.

Before we get started, let me tell you about a group of guys that I got to know a couple of months ago.

They reached out to me as fellow MIT alums, and I ended up interviewing them about one of their profitable side projects on IndieHackers.com. Dixon and Moe is a boutique digital agency. They're technical designers with a focus on business and marketing, and they specialize in helping bootstrapped founders grow their products. They're based in San Francisco, and they work with founders from all over the world, and they're big advocates of the Indie Hacker movement, both as participants, having made several revenue-generating projects in-house, and as design and development consultants who work with an array of founders and products. For example, they helped the founder of Wise Pops grow his revenue from $10,000 to $50,000 a month and quit his job at Amazon to go full-time on his side project. They helped Alex from Groove HQ, who, by the way, has David Houser as his loan investor, to reposition his help desk software from a scrappy app for startups to a professional tool used by companies big and small. He's now making $500,000 a month. Dixon and Mo are looking to take on two new projects this year and would love to see where they can help. You can chat with them over email or phone about any design, development, or marketing problem that you're struggling with. Reach out to Mo, that's M-O-E, at Moe at Dixon and Moe.com. That's D-I-X-O-N-M-O-D-C-com. And make sure to tell them that Cortland from

Indie Hacker sent you.

Hi, everybody. This is Cortland from Andy Hackers, and I'm sitting down today with Dave Houser,

the founder of Grasshopper and ChargerFy. How you doing, Dave? Good. Hey, Cortland. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being on the show. So you've done a lot of things in your career, including Grasshopper and Chargify. And I am personally the most familiar with Grasshopper. So we'll probably spend a little bit more time talking about that today.

But can you tell us a little bit about what grasshopper is and how it works?

Sure. Yeah. So myself and my business partner, CMAC, started Grasshopper more than 12 years ago now.

And the simplest way to describe it is we provide a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.

So what does that mean?

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