What's up, everybody?

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 did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their 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 profitable internet businesses. Today I'm talking to Ryan born of Cloud Campaign. Ryan, welcome to the show. Hey, Cortland, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for being here. Super excited to have you here. You are kind of my favorite type of guest to interview because I've seen you grow up on Andy Hackers. Two years ago, you're on the forum, you were emailing me with ideas, you're excited to get started on something. You're making approximately $0 a month in revenue back then.

What's your revenue at now?

Yeah, so we actually just crossed 25K MRR, which we're super excited about and growing

by about 32% month over month.

32%.

That's crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a really exciting journey with most of our growth coming in the past few months here. How does it feel to go from being like sort of a fledgling Andy Hacker to being someone who's actually doing it? Because I know in those early stages, it can kind of just feel like a dream. One day I'll have these kind of revenue numbers and one day I'll work for myself, but now you're actually here. Yeah, it's super interesting. I think it feels fragile at times. I feel like we've accomplished a lot and looking back to two and half years ago when I first started the company, it feels like we've done so much, but at the same time, it feels like it could go away at any point. Hopefully that's not the case, but honestly, that's how it feels. Yeah, the typical founder anxiety can all come crashing down.

Yeah, you think of every worst case scenario, you know, not what hopefully is actually going to happen, which is you keep growing at the same pace.

I very rarely encounter founders who actually have that kind of worst case scenario thing happen where overnight their business is dead.

But I so often encounter founders who have that, that fear and that belief that it can happen. It seems like it never goes away. I listen to how I built this, the podcast of the NPR, and even folks that are interviewed on there that are, you know, valued a billion dollars. It seems like they still have that same fear. Totally. Stripe has like a list of doomsday scenarios. What are the things the CEO is worried about? And those are very real threats that can really tank and kill any business. I mean, you see it happen with these huge unicorn startups all the time. We work was going to IPO a few months ago. Now they're like worth very little money and trying to scramble and save the company. So it's real. but at the same time, I think if you're building especially sort of a bootstrapped indie hacker business off the back of hundreds or thousands of paying customers and you've sort of grown at a healthy clip, which you've done, that's a little bit of security, a little bit of insurance where you know you've built on the back of something real and it's not just, you know, inflated valuations and fake numbers.

I think so too.

And I think it's something that we're trying to be pretty deliberate about in terms of building a business that is being funded by our customers.

I think just for full transparency, we're actually in the process of raising a seed round right now,

which isn't very typical for

indie hackers, but we see it as kind of augmenting our growth. But at the end of the day,

we're still trying to fuel our salaries and fuel the business based off our customers and our

revenue. Cool. So I want to talk about how you got here, because you first popped onto my

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