Christian and I talk about old tech, new tech, his long road from building a popular open source project to reduce his own AWS spend, to working for AWS (!) to providing a white-glove service for startups reducing their hosting costs. We find a few ways to improve his offering and expand his business beyond a one-man show. An rare pleasure which is…

Kris and I talk about living with autism, about the app he built to help his autistic daughter, and about the challenges engineers have when they approach marketing and selling. We find a super narrow and potentially effective niche to market his app in and we laugh a whole lot. A beautiful chat with a beautiful human being doing beautiful work. Re…

Ryuichi and I talk about why it's so hard to find a good idea for an indie business, why invalidation is much more important than validation and why we should focus on validating problems, not solutions. We also talk about some crazy family and relationship topics and laugh a whole lot. I usually trim the small talk out, but this time it was especi…

John and I talk about transitioning from an engineer into an entrepreneur, building a product out of a custom project, and the difference between building a personal brand and finding paying customers for your product. Read more of my thoughts on marketing and bootstrapping at finereli.substack.com. Not sure where to find users for your app? Get my…

Stop Building, and listen to this conversation with Ken Brittain (https://twitter.com/kenbrittain), where we talk in depth about selling to devs and devops, building credibility for entreprise sales and touch on going from an in-house project to a public product and gaining traction on Twitter. Here are some links we mentioned: GitLab - https://git…

Stop Building, and listen to this conversation with Igor Lanko (https://twitter.com/IgorLanko) where we talk in depth about how to convey an idea concisely, and touch on how to ask the right questions, and how to monetize a B2C product. Here are some links we mentioned: Tiny Seed (funding for startups): https://tinyseed.com/ Gumroad (easy sales pag…

Stop Building, and listen to this conversation with Phillip Keller. Phillip (@philkellr) is procrastinating on marketing his shared flat marketplace and he isn't sure how to get going. We dive into the topic of procrastination and especially marketing proctastination and figure out a surprising way out. Please reach out to me on Twitter at @finerel…

Stop Building, and listen to this conversation with Leo Guinan. Leo (@leo_guinan) is building a customizable search engine, something that should help everyone make sense of the incredible wealth of data we have online. While on the surface this sounds like a startup idea more at home in the early 2000's, we discover some surprising niches uses for…

Stop Building, and listen to this conversation James Morris. James (@moreofmorris) started writing a course to teach devs how to do UX better and in typical engineer fashion ended up building a whole platform to serve courses like this. We figure out where the product market fit for this platform might be and land on an a very exciting opportunity …