#112 – From Side Project to Full-Time Founder with Tommy Griffith of ClickMinded

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2019

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when the money you're making from your side project eclipses your salary from your full-time job? Tommy Griffith (@TommyGriffith) found out in the best way possible when he began generating six figures in revenue just a few years after he started teaching people everything he knew about SEO. Today his business, ClickMinded, generates over $40,000/month. In this episode we discuss the best ways to bootstrap an email list, why it takes 1000 days for a side project to replace your salary, and how a taste of freedom can make you unemployable.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/112-tommy-griffith-of-clickminded

Transcript

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0:00.0	Tommy Griffith, welcome to the Indie Hacker's podcast.
0:03.1	Cortland, thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
0:06.4	You previously managed SEO at both PayPal and Airbnb, and today you are the founder of a business called ClickMinded, which is on track to average about $40,000 a month and revenue in 2019.
0:16.9	Tell us a little bit about what ClickMinded is and who's using it.
0:20.6	Yeah, so ClickMinded is and who's using it.
0:26.9	Yeah, so ClickMinded is a digital marketing training platform for entrepreneurs and marketers.
0:30.9	We teach people how to do digital marketing. A lot of our customer avatars are entrepreneurs, in-house marketers, or consultants and agencies,
0:41.0	and we focus a lot on team training.
0:46.2	It started as a side project of mine. I was managing search engine optimization at PayPal and started physically teaching in-person SEO classes. So I would rent out a co-working space in San Francisco and North Beach in 2012,
0:57.6	rent out a working space and kind of teach people SEO. It was like a dorky kind of Saturday morning
1:02.9	sort of thing. All you can SEO who would kind of nerd out on people's websites from like nine
1:07.5	in the morning to five at night and try and figure out how to get them more traffic.
1:11.8	It was a really bad business. I really liked doing it, but it doesn't work. But it just ended up
1:21.6	being right place, right time with this kind of online course renaissance that we're in now.
1:25.8	I ended up taking that offline course,
1:27.8	turning it into an online course. It became a side project that I used at work. So once I moved
1:32.6	over to Airbnb, we would use the online SEO training to train up all the data scientists and
1:38.4	designers and engineers that joined the SEO team, part of the growth team at Airbnb. It eventually
1:43.2	it clips my salary. And then
1:44.8	two years ago, I left Airbnb to go full time on it. Now we have a small team of five and we're
1:50.0	growing a lot. So it's been a lot of fun. You wrote a blog post recently and you included a tweet from
1:55.2	Naval Ravacant that says, A Taste of Freedom can make you unemployable. At what point in this journey
	...

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