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Indie Hackers

#157 – Listening to Users and Growing to $100,000 MRR with Baird Hall of Wavve

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

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

4.9 β€’ 606 Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 10 April 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Baird Hall's (@BairdHall) first attempt at starting up didn't go so well. When all was said and done, he'd burned through his savings without finding a working business model, and he and his co-founder were forced to sell the business for parts. In other words: they were ready for round 2. In this episode, Baird explains why he can't stop bootstrapping businesses, why it's important to work together with a great team, and how listening to users helped him grow Wavve and Zubtitle to over $100,000/month in total recurring revenue.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/157-baird-hall-of-wavve

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.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 did they get to where they are today? How do they to make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses? 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'm talking to Baird Hall, the founder of a company called Wave. Baird, welcome to the show.

0:39.0

Hey, Corlin, thanks for having me.

0:42.1

I'm a long-time listener, so this is fun to be on the other side of it.

0:43.9

Yeah, it's fun to have you.

0:48.0

I think one of my favorite things about the podcast nowadays is that Indie Hackers has been around for long enough that I can bring on guests like you who were on the forum,

0:52.7

making posts and comments about getting started

0:54.6

with your business and apparently even listening to the podcast. And now you get to be on the podcast.

0:59.4

And we could talk about how far you've come and how successful you've been. You started Wave,

1:03.8

I think way back in December 2016. How much revenue is Wave doing today?

1:09.0

We just passed the 76K MRR mark recently and still having pretty good growth.

1:15.9

But yeah, we started it.

1:16.9

And we really launched it in January of 2017.

1:19.8

And I think that's about when I started showing up on the Indie Hackers forums.

1:24.0

Yeah, that was about seven months after I started Andy Hackers.

1:26.8

And since then you've also somehow found the time to start another business called Zubtitle. How much revenue is that one doing? I think we're 34,000 a month. Yeah, it seemed like a great idea at the time to start another bootstrap SaaS business. And now it's great, but that first year of that one was pretty tough,

1:44.9

but we'll get into that later. Yeah, but it sounds like it's going well. I mean, 76, 34,

1:49.3

it's $100,000 a month in revenue that you've basically added, starting in zero, three years ago.

1:56.2

And of course, that's not all going into your pocket. You have expenses, you have co-founders,

2:00.0

but I have to imagine that your life has changed quite a bit. It's not a ton different. I think the biggest difference is the pressure's off a little bit. You know, that first year or two when you're getting started. And at that point, I was in the hole, too, from a failed startup that we can talk about. But now the bills are getting paid. There's definitely less pressure. But aside from that, not much has changed. I started, I think my original goal was to create a business that would let me kind of work part-time and make full-time money. So my wife and I could travel. We really love to do that. But then we wound up having a baby. I got a four-month old at home. So it's funny that I've traded that freedom in for daddy daycare a couple of days a week. So were you a founder before Wave and before

2:39.9

this failed business? It was just sort of your first foray into starting companies. No, this was

2:44.7

the first. 2016, that first failed startup that we tried was my first go at it. Before that, in 2010 out of college, I worked for a big

2:53.7

software company here in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live, a big publicly traded company.

...

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