#138 – Finding a Positive Feedback Loop to Profitability with Robert James Gabriel of Helperbird

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

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Robert James Gabriel (@RobertJGabriel) never had it easy growing up. Before he was finally diagnosed with dyslexia at age 17, he had teachers counsel him to drop out of school and was told he would never amount to anything. But with some positive encouragement from a few helpful mentors and individuals, Robert found his way, learned to code, and became a prolific indie hacker. In this episode Robert and I discuss the psychological effects of being trapped inside both negative and positive feedback loops, his strategy for coming up with dozens of product ideas, and the story behind how he bootstrapped his app Helperbird into a six-figure business that helps others with learning disabilities like dyslexia.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/138-robert-james-gabriel-of-helperbird

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everybody?
0:08.5	This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
0:13.2	On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I'm trying to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.
0:19.1	How do they get to where they are today?
0:20.6	How do 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, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Robert James Gabriel. He's the founder of a company called HelpRbert. Robert, welcome to the show.
0:37.9	Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for coming on. So tell us about
0:42.8	Helperbird. What is it exactly? So Helperbird was a site project that initially started about
0:48.5	three years ago. And what Helperbird is is a tool for any browser that help people with learning
0:53.6	difficulties, such as dyslexia
0:55.2	dyspraxia a light sensey disorder or even people who have epilepsy and what help about it does it allows
1:01.6	the user to have complete customization over the web and what do i mean by that some users can find the
1:07.2	background colors a bit harsh so they can customize it to a blue color or a green color.
1:12.4	They can change the fonts, the color of the fonts,
1:14.5	add overlays, text to speech, speech to text,
1:17.2	add a built-in note system.
1:19.6	You can remove all distracting images and ads
1:22.4	and kind of customize the web to your own needs.
1:24.8	And we also do a thing for epilepsy,
1:27.4	where we can remove flashing images
1:28.9	as well. So you can like mix and match all these features and make the web easier for you to make it
1:33.6	easier to kind of browse the web a lot easier. And I know that helperbirds started off as a side
1:40.6	project. You've grown it to five figures a month in revenue. Are you full time on it yet?
	...

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