What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both of their companies and other personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Today, I am excited to be talking to the one and only Rob Walling. I think the best way to describe Rob is that he's really the entrepreneur is entrepreneur. He's bought companies and grown them. He started companies from scratch. He has bootstrapped companies from nothing to profitability and millions of dollars in revenue. Somehow during all this, he found the time to write Start Small, Stay Small, which is the book for developers looking to create their own profitable internet businesses. He's the co-host of the podcast, startups for the rest of us, which if you haven't listened to, I highly recommend. He co-created microconf, the world's biggest conference for his self-funded software companies, which I was lucky enough to speak at this past year. And today he's working on a new project that a lot of people are talking about called Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. So Rob, welcome to the Indiacas podcast. You are just everywhere, man. And I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. It's my pleasure. That was a heck of an intro. You nailed it. Well, you've done a heck of a lot of things. It's been a long list. I think that starts implying at a certain point that you're just you're just getting old. Yeah, I was tempted

instead of doing that whole intro to just introduce you as the grandfather of bootstrapping,

but I didn't want to date you. I appreciate that, man. Yeah, now I've been doing this for a while.

I started trying to launch stuff around, well, almost 18 years ago and really had my first success

maybe 13 years ago. So if that gives people

an idea of time frame. Yeah. What made you first decide to become an entrepreneur? Take us back

18 years ago. Well, yeah. I mean, so I graduated from college about 20 years ago in 98 and I really

didn't want to work for other people. I wanted the freedom to be able to make

things. And, you know, when I was a kid, let's say eight years old, I learned a program on my little

Apple to wee that my parents got me. And I loved the freedom and the power. It felt I was eight.

I felt God-like power

to be able to write a text-based game

with code that actually worked

and that people could play.

And ever since then,

that's kind of all I wanted to do

was make stuff.

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