Johannes Radig (@joradig) runs a SaaS from the Canary Islands — the most recent stop on a globe-spanning digital nomad trip. Johannes and I chat about building a software business for agencies, how hard it is to find just the right prices, and what traditional marketing efforts can do for indie hackers. We dive into Leadsie, the social media onboarding SaaS he co-founded, and how it is built as a calm and profitable business.
Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today on The Bootstrapped Founder is Johannes Radig, a German indie hacker and digital nomad who shares his journey of building a business while traveling the world. We talked about his nomadic lifestyle and changing it to becoming more of a localized entrepreneur and the challenges he faced along the way, quite literally, because he went from place to place. He talks about the importance of customer interviews, we dive really deep into that and the pivot of his business from an audit tool to an onboarding SaaS, why did it happen, how it happened, and why it had to happen. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Now, here’s Johannes.
It’s not often that I get to talk to a German indie hacker on this show because there really are just a few of us. But it’s especially rare to talk to somebody who comes from my hometown and to someone who moved far away to a faraway place to run a digital business from. A German on the Canary Islands, that’s really cool. Do you consider yourself a digital nomad? Is that still something we do?
Johannes Radig 0:58
First of all, thanks for having me, Arvid. Yeah, I am. I do consider myself a digital nomad who has settled in Tenerife, I would say, but I’m still traveling a fair bit because I also really enjoy traveling still, but this has become my base. Yes, for sure.
Arvid Kahl 1:16
That’s really cool. So I know you have like a history in nomading around, right? Like you were more actively traveling through the world. Can you maybe like, what’s the intentional thing to do this as like a business thing? Like, did you travel because you wanted to run a business at the same time? Or did you just travel and then you happen to become an indie hacker or nomads that build stuff?
Johannes Radig 1:39
So I used to live in London. And it’s a great, great city. But at some point, you kind of feel like maybe there’s more to be seen in the world. And I’ve always enjoyed traveling a lot. And so during my last job before I became an indie founder as well, I kind of just heard about this nomadism thing. And I was like, well, this seems to be interesting. This is not something we can try out? So I was talking to my, at the point my girlfriend now my wife, and we’re both really excited about this concept. And so in so we basically just, we booked a flight, like we, maybe around September, October time, we looked into flights in the coming summer and then we found really cheap flights from London to Cuba. We were like, okay, let’s just book that and make that the date. And so that’s when we I already had conversations with my boss at the time as well to, you know, prepare him for that this will come. And then we just embarked on it, really. And that was in 2018. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 2:45
That’s crazy. So can you walk me through this, like you fly to Cuba and then what? Did you already have something in mind?
Johannes Radig 2:54
Great question because for those who have been to Cuba, they will know that internet and Cuba and working remotely in Cuba do not go well together. My girlfriend at the time now my wife, Sarah, let’s just say Sarah. Sarah had a job to basically working as an online teacher to teach Chinese children. Arvid, there’s another thing that we can maybe touch on because
Arvid Kahl 2:55
Yeah, holy wow!
Johannes Radig 3:00
That would be about your previous company. And so she was teaching Chinese children, English. And so she had to be online also at very random, very early in the morning, Cuba time. And so in Cuba, you don’t have like, private residences don’t have internet. So basically, you find internet in public squares. And you have to buy a kind of scratch card with a code. And then you put in this code when you log into this Wi Fi hotspot and you kind of pray that it kind of works. And most of the time, it doesn’t really. And so Sarah found a hotel nearby that had internet so that there are few hotels, but it’s probably like less than 10 in all of Cuba that have internet and kind of taught from there. But basically, she ended up being fired from that job because it just didn’t work, which was probably a blessing in disguise because it probably wasn’t the best job for her anyway. She enjoyed it. But the pay was wasn’t very good. But yeah, so that’s how it started. So Cuba was basically we quickly realized working from here, probably isn’t going to be too productive. And so we just basically postponed it until we made it to Mexico a couple of weeks later and then we started to properly work remotely.
Arvid Kahl 4:43
Okay. That’s such an interesting path to travel because when I think about indie hacking of like digital nomadism combined, right? In the culture and the community that we’re both in, I think about Bali. I think about like Thailand or Vietnam like places in Southeast Asia. The fact that you went to Cuba of all places and then to Mexico, which is also again, like not towards Asia, but further away from it. I mean, it’s a globe, you know, further away also means kind of closer, but you know what I mean. Right? That’s an interesting choice. So it sounds like you either you didn’t do the research or you didn’t really care about the specificity of where you go. You just wanted to travel. Like, what’s the kind of motivation other than just traveling? Or do we just like, oh, well, let’s go there.
Johannes Radig 5:28
No, we definitely we really wanted to go to Central and South America. So that was definitely something we wanted to explore. Mexico, actually, it’s still North America. So North Central and South America to be precise. And we, I had never been actually before. So that was my first time on that continent. And we just thought we will make it work. So obviously, yes, Bali also at the time was already more famous for remote working, but it still wasn’t big. Like it was famous for backpacking, mostly, I think at the time. And yeah, so that’s why we thought okay, let’s try out Central South America and see if we like it.
Arvid Kahl 6:12
Did you?
Johannes Radig 6:14
Yes, absolutely. It’s yeah, I mean, we really enjoyed it. I mean, there’s love stories we can talk about from hiking up a volcano in Guatemala, an active volcano and having marshmallows fried in the lava to meeting many interesting people and incredible landscapes, incredible culture. It’s been really great. So yeah, if you haven’t been, I don’t know. Have you been to South America, Central America?
Arvid Kahl 6:47
I’ve been to South America. It was a cruise. I went there with my grandma. Like my grandma was in her 80s, I guess and she always wanted to go to Tierra del Fuego, like the Fire Island on the southern tip of South America. Because that was a childhood dream of hers. Like she was born in 1933. And like back then Germany, not the most, you know, joyous time to be alive, like with the war and all that kind of stuff. Also, the educational system was a bit weird. Let’s just say that. Right? So she didn’t get to see much of the world obviously. And she didn’t learn much about it. But she saw on a map that part of South America, I really wanted to go there. So I took her. I took her on a cruise. We went to Buenos Aires. We just traveled all the way down to the southern tip and to Chile on the way back, but I never made it like past Argentina towards the north, which I would love to go like that is a very interesting part of the world for sure. But yeah, that’s my experience there. It sounds like you had a really good time there. Right? What made you then where did you go from there? Because you ended up somewhere else. Right?
Johannes Radig 7:51
So yeah, we ended up spending about two years traveling across the whole continent all the way down to Patagonia, actually, with a few stints were also had to go somewhere else for work reasons. But we basically traveled all the way down. We didn’t go to every single country, but we spend, we usually spend about one to two months, sometimes even three months in the countries we visited. So we had a great time and then we hopped over to South Africa. So that was another country we wanted to visit. And we find a flight from Brazil at the time to visit South Africa and obviously very different but also super interesting, specifically Cape Town, Johannesburg, Joburg. I like to say Johannesburg because my name is in it. So
Arvid Kahl 8:43
Oh, that’s funny. How did you make money along the way? Like were you already building things? Or were you like working as a freelancer at the time?
Johannes Radig 8:51
Yeah, that’s a great question. Sorry, I didn’t even touch on that. So yeah, I was working as a freelancer. And specifically, so my background is mostly marketing apart from being a founder later on and doing everything, basically, right? So my expertise lies in marketing, SEO, but also, you know, pay channels like Facebook, Instagram ads. Basically all the advertising channels that are out there at some point in my career touched on. And so I helped different companies with that, with SEO and also running ads for like, with B2C startup and I had a few different clients along the way. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 9:33
Well, that’s cool. So like, I was just wondering, like, when did the spark for building your own thing happen along this path? Like where, you know, I mean, now we are in the story, at least. We’re somewhere in South Africa, which is also a great place. I got to visit there just before the pandemic changed the world, which was really fortunate that was funny enough, kind of ties things together a little bit because you mentioned Sarah was doing this online English teaching. We had a business that was facilitating some administrative stuff for online English teachers. We sold that just in 2019. And because we sold that we got to travel. And that was because like for that reason we ended up in South Africa at that point, got to see all those places that you mentioned as well, including Joburg, which is a very interesting place for sure. So how did you make it to the Canary Islands where I think you’re more stationary now? Right? And it doesn’t have to do with you actually building a business at this time like that you’ve tried to find a place, you know, to build a home kind of a, you know, an office in?
Johannes Radig 10:32
Yeah, great question again. So I’ve always had this, I guess, dream to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur. I was felt that this is kind of what I meant to do. Actually, it was also part of my family life. So my dad and also my stepdad, above entrepreneurs and so was my mom, also most of her career. So it was always part of my life. And so I thought, okay, at some point, I need to try something. And the freelance work, I would say, also really gave me a lot of confidence in my skills and being able to work by myself or ideally with someone else. And so basically, I had this idea and what the first thing I did, so this might be interesting. The first thing I did in the beginning of 2020, you know, New Year’s Eve, you kind of you know, have things that you want to do in the year. So one of the things I did was I reached out to people in kind of good friends of mine but professional friends, let’s say so people I really respect in the marketing world business world. And just asked them like, so asked them at relatively broad question about things that they think should be done better or there should be like a better software for this would be some kind of automation or something like that, like it was pretty broad question. And it probably wasn’t a great question, either. But at least it was a starting point. And actually, from that, I got a few really good responses back. And that lets us or led me first to the path of what has what later became Leadsie. So that was the starting point.
Arvid Kahl 12:11
Leadsie is an interesting thing. I do want to talk about this because it feels that you just said something. I don’t know if you notice that but you said ideally building it with somebody else. That is not necessarily the solopreneur perspective that you get to see in indie hacking and in digital nomading, where people just say, I’m gonna go there. I’m going to do whatever I want. Right? It sounds like you are, of course, you are in a partnership like, you know, a romantic partnership, but also in a business partnership. And that is not something that most indie hackers, the indie parts to many is very independent. Right? So how does that play into this? Like, did you build this with a co founder from the start?
Johannes Radig 12:50
Yeah. So it’s interesting. So as I said, beginning of 2020, I reached out to some people. And then something that I’ve been doing for a couple of years too, is a mentoring startups actually funny enough startups that are on the VC track. So they get VC investments and they join an accelerator program, specifically was 500 global, that’s VC effort working for mostly. And so at the time, beginning of 2020, I was in a program in, I believe it was Saudi Arabia. So working with startups from the Middle East region. And I met someone there, already in the previous program but someone I, you know, got along really well with and I really, you know, just enjoyed his company. And it was talking to him about my business or my business idea at this point. It was not a business. And but I started, just started to do some work on my own. So I started to hack something together with no code tools to build this first kind of, I’ll talk a bit more about what it actually was. But so I hacked something together with no code. I can code a little bit, but it’s very basic. And then at the same time, also started to do some validation by reaching out to possible customers. So specifically, they were yeah, marketing agencies actually, already at the time. So I, you know, tried to find ways to cold email them and actually pretty quickly had interviews lined up. So during the program, during this accelerator program, in the evenings I basically and also the morning, sometimes I took some time to talk to potential clients of this new solution, which I hadn’t even built at a time, right. That’s actually something we could talk about, as well why that’s so important. So this person that I met there, his name is Robert Desmond. He, I guess he was really, really impressed by that, I guess, to some extent and I think he also deep down wanted to do his own thing. And yeah, we just started talking about it. And that intensified over the coming months. And then we started to do this venture together and I’m extremely happy that it happened that way because I think doing it alone is by multitudes more difficult. And yeah, I think having a co founder makes it easier in many ways. And so I’m very glad that that’s how it happened.
Arvid Kahl 15:18
Is he a technical co founder? Would you call him that?
Johannes Radig 15:21
Yes, yes. So he’s a developer. And he, yeah, he’s the technical side. He’s the CTO, essentially, of Leadsie. And he’s also great in many other areas. So we complement each other a lot.
Arvid Kahl 15:37
Oh, that’s good. That’s good to hear. And I guess that’s really what you need. Right? If you look in a co founder for business like this, you want somebody to complement your skills. I mean, I’ve talked to Rob Walling about this. And he’s seen a lot of people in TinySeed and inside their MicroConf community. He’s seen examples of founders that get another marketing founder in, so they just have twice the capacity to do marketing, right. So it’s not just you always have to find a technical and non technical founder. There are also groups of people, just two technical people and they figure it out along the way. So it’s just interesting to see that you went for the complementary approach. Now, let’s talk about Leadsie. What does Leadsie do? Or maybe what did Leadsie do in the beginning in your little prototype? And what did it grow into?
Johannes Radig 16:18
Perfect. So in the beginning, my idea was more around helping companies, startups because I was working with startups, but genuinely companies of any size to be better at Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. So what I’ve noticed also through my mentoring was, people are just doing so many silly mistakes, just burning money, you know and the only one who’s happy about it is probably Facebook, but not even them because they’re not going to see more money coming, right, if they’re not successful. So what we built was a essentially, like an audit tool. So tool that would allow you to say, hey, you know, you get temporary access to my Facebook ad account. And then the tool would tell you recommendations and also give you a bit more visibility of like, what are your best creatives? What’s performing well, which audiences? And then so kind of going through best practices, like kind of like a checklist of what are you doing well on where could you maybe make some improvements. That was the first product and then relatively quickly, we wanted to sell this to agencies as a way to generate leads. So many agencies usually as part of their lead generation, they offer a free audit anyway to their potential clients. And we wanted to help them generate this audit at scale, basically, with the tool that we have. There are many similar tools that exist for that, by the way. So for SEO, it’s very common thing but nothing existed. Still, nothing really exists for paid, specifically Facebook, Instagram ads. And that’s what we built. But that’s not what Leadsie is doing right now. So maybe you can ask them what went wrong?
Arvid Kahl 18:06
That is an interesting question because like that explains the name too like that lead focus and the lead and Leadsie, that would rings a bell because right now you’re building a very different tool. Like it’s kind of a social media account onboarding tool, right? Like, how did that shift?
Johannes Radig 18:24
Yeah, perfect. Great question. So yeah, so we kind of, we got some early validation and we felt like this is something really that agencies want. But after building out, let’s say prototype, like something that actually worked pretty well. And working on it really for probably, I would say, maybe six months or so. We didn’t, once we were kind of asked them like so let’s you know, please pay for this now, they all went quiet basically. I’m simplifying it a little bit, but we didn’t get a lot of payment intent. And that’s always a sign that there’s something a little bit off. And I don’t want to go too much into the details of why that was. But we definitely realized this is not going to be an easy sell. Right? And we kind of went back to the interviews that we had done. So something that we and my co founder now I feel like that is very, very important when you’re building a business is talking to your customers and to your potential customers. And we really did that a lot. We did a pretty sure over 50 interviews with different agencies. And so we kind of went back and kind of reflected what else did they tell us? And when we did these interviews, we always asked about the entire kind of process. So how do you find new clients for example and then so what happens when you onboard them and so on, right? So that the whole process to understand where our pain points, right? And where could our product potential product help as a solution help and this problem of onboarding and specifically getting access to clients accounts, basically always came up. Every second conversation, the agencies would say, yeah this is such a such a pain point. This is so painful. What they usually had to do was jumping on a Zoom call with the clients at the end of the day after, you know, they would send some instructions to client, which is kind of not do them or don’t do it right or be completely confused. And then they would have to go on a Zoom call and then walk the client through and be like, yeah, no, you have to click there. I’m not this not that, you know, like, it’s just, it’s super painful, right? And so, yeah, with this realization, we were like, okay, well, maybe we can actually build something that actually solves that specific issue. And we did relatively quickly. And we saw a lot more traction much quicker for this product. And that’s why we then at some point, decided to shut down the audit.
Arvid Kahl 21:01
Well, you needed it to get there. That’s what I’m realizing from this, right? Like Leadsie as it is right now would never exist, if you didn’t have the necessity to really dig into the problems and challenges of your customers, which is cool, right? It’s cool that you built something that allows you to get to this level then to jump on the next level from there, I think that’s an important step for most indie hackers to understand that your first thing is probably going to suck in a neutral way. Right? I’m not saying it’s badly done. It may just not have the fit that you need, but it will facilitate conversations. I love the fact that you did like 50 of those interviews. That’s really cool. And I love the fact that you’ve zoomed out also really important. Did you do anything else during these interviews that gave you like an indication of budget or indication of payment intent that might not be apparent or very obvious to people, particularly people like me who are more technical and don’t like to talk to other people that much, right? Unless it’s about a cool topic that we both enjoy, you know, like German hip hop, but let’s get to that later. Like, is there anything that you can share for indie hackers to use in these kinds of conversations?
Johannes Radig 22:11
Yeah, so I mean, there are obviously different tactics around like, what can you do to really understand if someone is happy to pay for a solution? But it is tricky. So in our case, what we didn’t do is we didn’t just say, hey, this is the problems of the tool, just pay for it. Right? We didn’t do that. Not sure if that was a mistake or I don’t know but we definitely, which was kind of first we just get the product out for free. And then we were thinking, well, if it generates value, then they’re going to pay for it, right? But they kind of drag their feet, right. And so we kind of felt like there was something clearly wrong here. And one of the specific interview techniques around value that I can maybe share is, this is from a really great mentor we work with. It’s kind of asking them, how much. So it’s difficult question, how valuable is this to you? Right? Like no, like, first of all, they don’t want to say, yeah, I would pay 1000s of dollars for this, right? Because they don’t really want to pay more than they have to. And so one of the techniques we use was, we kind of asked them about other tools that they’re paying for. And then we asked them to compare the value with another tool. So is it as valuable as an Asana, let’s say, right? I don’t know, maybe $10 a month for mostly free even. Or is it as value as you know, some specified agency solution that costs, you know, north to $300. So that was a way for us to understand the value of what we’re offering and then also for the current product, so maybe that’s something that can be helpful for.
Arvid Kahl 23:52
Yeah. And it seems to give you an indication of prices too, right? Like, what prices to go with? Did you do a lot of like pricing experimentation in the beginning? Or do you still do that?
Johannes Radig 24:05
We kind of, as I said, started with like these sort of interviews and then from there, we set a price. And probably there’s nothing else we did, which I probably should touch on. So we set some price, an arbitrary price based on kind of what we thought was going to be fine. Obviously was going to be way too cheap, for sure. Like it always is in the beginning.
Arvid Kahl 24:26
Yeah, sure is.
Johannes Radig 24:27
What something else that we did, which might be a bit controversial is we actually went on to AppSumo. So that was in the beginning of 2021, I believe. So that was relatively when we had the product in a decent place. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to get real people using it. We wanted to get usage and wanted to get feedback on that. And I would say overall it was a good experience because we got a lot of feedback but also the sort of customers that are on AppSumo, they are not necessarily, first of all, they are most definitely not your best customers. And many of them may not even use you. So we still have people contacting us now, you know, three years later and say, oh, yeah, I just sold it to someone else. Can you please change the username or whatever, you know, move the account over. So it’s still like, it’s been painful. We actually still do it because we’re nice. But that was interesting. And we also had to fight to get the listing of AppSumo’s website because basically, you know, even if you stop your offer, you’re still ranked that you’re still on the website. And when people search for your brand, they might find the AppSumo offer. And they’re like, well, you know, this used to cost I don’t know what it was, $60 for like a very limited lifetime deal. And this would anchor your pricing very quickly, right? It would be like, well, this was used to be the price. So it can cost 99 a month now. Right? So that was something we had to navigate. In pricing, what we definitely realized at some point, we were too cheap. And we started raising our prices, gradually and we’re probably going to do that again at some point, when we feel like we can justify it. So when we add more value through a different integrations or features that say that really, you know, generate more value for our clients. And I think we’re confident to raise prices. And I think that’s something that companies, startups, indie hackers in particular, should do. Also, here’s the thing, definitely raise your prices for your existing customers. This is one of the biggest learnings that we had. So obviously, most, you know, if you’re a nice person, especially I feel like this is something that maybe developers really also feel like it’s almost compulsory is like, yeah, these early people that supported us, we cannot change the price for them. And even I felt the same. But that’s the wrong thinking, I believe now in retrospective because in the beginning, we didn’t raise it for the existing customers.
Arvid Kahl 27:14
Okay, yeah. Why?
Johannes Radig 27:15
Why? Because I think you’re gonna leave a lot of money on the table. That’s the main thing. And I also think, obviously, you don’t have to raise the price for existing customers straightaway, like, doesn’t have to be like, you know, tomorrow is going to be more expensive. You can be nice about it because they know you’re going to have six months or some period of time to show them that you appreciate, obviously, that they’re using you. But also this is a business relationship, right? You don’t have to be too thankful. They’re getting value from it. So it’s the main thing is you leaving a lot of money on the table and it creates like, also you have to manage all plans like legacy things that never really good thing in your code or even Stripe.
Arvid Kahl 28:00
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this too, like building my own thing right now. I already have like three tiered pricing knowing that if I ever change something, now I’m going to have a fourth tier. It’s going to be hidden but still kinda there. Yeah, there’s complexity in this and I think you’re absolutely right. I love that you use the word payment intent earlier because in a way, your existing customers are probably the highest payment intent, like users that you ever have, right? The people who already pay, like, clearly they have intend to pay. So they should also be the people that you introduce your prices to because that might give you the most sane feedback or most informed feedback of all, like, if it’s too high, they’re gonna fight back. And if it’s high enough to just, like show how the value has increased over time, then you’re on a good path. I really, really liked this as a thought that yeah, you do it with the people who already pay you, right, who already have this willingness to pay. Interesting.
Johannes Radig 28:55
Exactly. So one more thing to add here is, I think it’s wise to look at your data and look at the customers who you’re raising the prices for. And if you have customers who may be paying you, but they actually never really use you or very, very rarely, maybe consider not raising the price for them, right? Because you kind of know, they’re not getting value, right? So they may have just kind of forgotten about the subscription. And you know like, okay, it’s not worth kind of poking into that business, I guess, you could say or I don’t know.
Arvid Kahl 29:25
That is another another interesting point because now, I think that there is a business opportunity, even in just scoring the people for that, right? What is the likelihood of somebody canceling when I increased the prices? And what is the likelihood of them actually paying it? Right? And on a per account level with the usage metrics, I can see some indie hacker just typing away at an idea just from this conversation. I would love to see this too because it feels like something could hook into Stripe or into Paddle and into some kind of metric service. Very cool. I want to talk about AppSumo for a second just as a little general question about this. Would you do this again? If you were to build a new business, would you jump started with this AppSumo limited lifetime deal? I would like to know what the limitations were. Did it do enough good to warrant the little stressful things that you now need to deal with?
Johannes Radig 30:18
I would say I would really think about it a lot. I would tend to say probably not because now I also feel confident that even if things are relatively slow in the beginning, that’s okay to spend some time to figure out how to get the right customer, at least based on your hypothesis, right? Like in the beginning, you may not know exactly who is the perfect customer. But you can, you know, you have to be a little bit patient to try to get that customer or change it if you feel like it’s going to be a different kind of persona. Whereas with AppSumo is like you kind of get anyone and many of them are just looking for a great deal, you know, so that’s not very useful. Obviously, it gives you a bit of a cash injection as well, which can be helpful. In our case, maybe just also to share that. Both my co founder and I, we both worked as freelancers on the side until probably a year and a half into the business. So, which is I think, quite typical, I would guess. But that’s something you have to be prepared for too to not expect that your new little indie hacker project is going to pay you the bills.
Arvid Kahl 31:28
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like those things. And that’s the fun part about slow growth. It’s kind of linear, like it’s super slow in the beginning and you start with your $50 MRR and then you get to 100 a week later or hopefully or a month later or whatever. And then it’s slow, slow, slow, but it’s gonna keep being like it’s gonna go up, right? So give it a year or two and all of a sudden, you’re going from 6000 to 6500 and on and on and on. So you just reinforced these mechanisms that yeah, of course, that’s how it works. Did you have a kind of an MRR or any kind of revenue metric where you said, now it’s time to go full time on this? How was that choice made for both of you?
Johannes Radig 32:08
I can’t remember exactly the number now, to be honest with you. I think, definitely, we had this number. I think probably when we were able to pay us each in a more than I guess more than maybe 3,000 or 4,000 euros something like that maybe. I would say then we probably set yeah, I think it’s okay for us now to just quit any other activity, really. The mentoring, we’re still doing, by the way more or less, both of us because we just enjoy it. But at that point, we were like okay, we both luckily live in places that are not too expensive. So I think in London, it would have been hard with I think maybe it was two and a half thousand euros could be or something like that. And in London, you cannot really survive for that money, probably the same in Silicon Valley and New York and many other more expensive places. And in Germany, most of Germany as well.
Arvid Kahl 33:07
Yeah, that’s right.
Johannes Radig 33:09
But yeah, the Canaries, canaries are actually relatively cheap, which is quite nice. And my co founder lives, he’s from the UK, but he lives in Poland. He has a family to feed. So there’s definitely that consideration. And I think he may be continue to work a little bit longer with one day a week with doing some other consulting together with me. And but yeah, at some point, we could stop that.
Arvid Kahl 33:32
That’s very, very cool. It’s nice to see like that you both found smart places to live and operate from. I think that like you’re right, in most places two and a half thousand euros, which is yeah, I guess roughly the same in US is dependent right on the economy and all that. That is definitely enough for most places, but definitely not enough for some. And most places where indie hackers congregate or generally what developers congregate a bigger cities because that’s where the bigger employers are. So if you want to take the change from being an employed salaried engineer to being an indie hacker in a place where you have to spend 4000, $5,000 or whatever euros on rent and food every month is going to be tough, right? You’re going to have to run this as a side project for a long, long time. So I guess that if you were in London, how long would it have taken you to actually run this project? Did you ever do the math? Like how much longer you would have done it on the side?
Johannes Radig 34:29
Correct question. I don’t even want to think about it.
Arvid Kahl 34:34
Alright!
Johannes Radig 34:34
It definitely is much, much, much harder. I mean, yeah, you can also live on less even in bigger cities, but then you have to move out of the city then I mean, at least you don’t have to commute so much if you kind of probably work from home. But it’s definitely the life quality is a bit more a bit less than if it’s much cheaper around you. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 34:55
For sure. Yeah. One thing that you just said to me like in terms of risks is very interesting. I want to dive into this a little bit because you said, like he’s still working one day or was working one day on the side to kind of balance that off and make enough money to sustain the family. And I think in all indie hacking all entrepreneurship, this kind of risk assessment is always one of the most important things to do right, right? Like, is it okay for me to stop working as a freelancer? Or should I quit my job? Or should I go halftime or whatever? Is the risk of my business exploding too high for me to make this choice? Or how easy is it to get back? So I’m particularly interested in this because you are working effectively with agencies who are using somebody else’s credentials on somebody else’s platform to do some work. Like there is a lot of platform risks stacked on top of each other, right? You’re working with clients that are shaky that might lose their clients. Their clients are depending on platforms like Facebook or Google or Twitter or wherever the ads are being run, right? Like, how do you deal with those risks in particular, that you’re stacking all these platforms on top of each other?
Johannes Radig 36:12
Nice, yeah, good question. I actually feel like we haven’t even, I haven’t really said what Leadsie is really doing. So let me just pick one, like so what we ended up building is a solution that helps agencies get access to their clients accounts in a extremely easy way. So they just have one link, which is sent to the clients. And then the client can give access to, you know, Facebook page, ad accounts, all the different assets as they’re called to all the different Google profiles, Google Analytics, Google ads, Search Console, Merchant Center and so on. There’s lots of things there as well as Tiktok, as well. So but all through one link and it walks the client through and it makes it much, much easier. So that’s what we ended up building. So you’re right. And of course, we have platform risk, which is, it is what it is. We are living with it. And we also definitely had to go through some problems with API’s where, for example, Facebook at some point, just decided to switch something off. And we were like, okay, this is a big problem. But you sort of work around it. How do I deal with that? It’s, you know, we were just enjoying the ride and we’re just doing what we can. I think we believe that what we’re doing is still at it’s like, it’s not threatening Facebook. And it’s kind of like, it’s something that they’ve probably that there’s no, I feel like that there’s no real there’s no crazy risk that they’re going to switch this off for some reason. But it could happen. I don’t know, like the risk is there. So I also think, what helps me personally is to think about, okay, what’s the worst that can happen? Right? So let’s say Leadsie fails. And we have to shut down the business, which really, hopefully is not going to happen. And there’s a lot of other platforms we also have anyway. But if it happens, then there’s always other opportunities out there. Whether it’s another indie hacker project or working for someone. We’ve met some really great people along the way through this. So I think, you know, you just gotta be open for thinking about what’s the worst that can happen. There’s a nice exercise that Tim Ferriss recommends, which is the fear setting exercise. So really writing down what are you really scared about? And then what’s really the worst that could happen. And often you realize, it’s really not that bad. And maybe it’s also the Nomading in South America that made us realize that it’s like, we can live with very little, very nice lives. And I think we could always go back to that if needed, which we hopefully don’t have to, but it’s a possibility.
Arvid Kahl 38:57
This is a very reasonable approach. I really like, honestly, it’s very German of you just like it was straightforward, you know, like, yeah, that’s gonna happen, this could happen. We’ll figure it out. I personally, I subscribe to the same like process, the same thinking and fear setting is something that I regularly do because of this because it allows me to see okay, and if it fails, well, good. I learned something. If it doesn’t fail, good. I’m gonna keep learning something, right. Like either way, there’s learning. Either way, there’s a move towards something else. So that’s really cool. And you’re right, like in a way, if Google were to turn off their OAuth authentication, which I guess is how they authenticate all their accounts or Facebook were to do this, by first of all, they authenticate their own platforms with this kind of tool. So it would be very odd for them to just turn it off. But if they would, something else would have to be there for people to give their money to Google or to give their money to Facebook. And you could still facilitate that because that’s something that when we had a conversation when we had a customer interview, when I did a customer interview with you for my product, we talked a lot about jobs to be done. And I think that is a topic that I really want to dive into a little bit here. Because first off, you know a lot about it. You’ve mentored people on this issue. And to me, what you’re currently doing with Leadsie is a replacement of a very manual, very chaotic, very all over the place job to be done that you consolidate into a software tool. If the platform should change, it would fall apart again into a manual chaotic process, which you could then build another software tool to facilitate, right? You would be able to recover because you already know how to take this manual process and turn it into a streamlined software solution. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about the job to be done here. How did you figure this out other than through the customer calls? And how did you figure out how exactly to build a solution for a job that somebody else needed to be doing?
Johannes Radig 40:55
Great, yeah, I love jobs to be done and talking about it and mentoring startups on it. So this is one of the topics that I usually cover in my kind of mentoring and talks with startups. And why is it so useful? I think it makes you think about what is the core that somebody wants to achieve, right? So you could look at what we’re doing at a surface level. And of course, there you would notice or you’d say, well, yeah, we get the agency access. And that is true. That is probably there is a job that we’re doing for them. But there’s a lot more here, right? So and you figure that out when you’re talking to your customer, but also asking the right questions. And so what we figured out is, for example, that there’s a lot of uncertainty in the beginning when a agency starts working with a client. The client isn’t really sure about the agency. So the agency has to build trust. They want to be seen as this, like, you know, very state of the art company that knows the latest trends and does everything like in a really good way. And so they want to project a very good image. They want to make a good impression. They want to make a great impression, in fact and what I talked about earlier, this process of like, yeah, you have to click there and share your screen and then click but it’s just painful, right? So that’s why this is one of the most important realizations we’ve had that, you know, it’s really all about making a great impression at a very crucial time in the onboarding. The second thing also is the earlier the agency gets access, the quicker they can actually generate results, right?
Arvid Kahl 42:42
Yes
Johannes Radig 42:42
Many agencies work on a maybe monthly contract basis, right? But even if it’s three months, like two weeks of waiting for access, make a huge difference. And so that’s why our agencies love us because it’s just get some access much quicker. They can actually show that they’re able to produce results, which then means they have better retention rates. And that allows and then also probably better word of mouth. So a lot of things that gets together, which is why we’ve yeah, we’ve now on like, we’ve given access to over 140,000 accounts at this point, right? We connect about almost 4000 assets, like accounts, but like also pixels and so on over 4000 per week. So it’s really a big scale at this point. And it’s great to be part of that.
Arvid Kahl 43:30
I love that none of the things that you talked about have anything to do really with technology. It all has to do with trust, with showing up, with proving value. But it has nothing to do with the OAuth 2.0 implementation or whatever, right? Like, it’s really cool because that’s the job to be done here is to build a relationship and build a relationship that people can rely on and then use to build their own relationships, right? Like the agencies that you help, they want to build good relationships with their clients and their customers. So you built this relationship by building a great product for them. And they built their relationship. That’s really nice. It’s kind of a relationship cascade that you’re doing here. It’s just very, very interesting thing. Very cool. That’s yeah. Wow. I don’t know what to say.
Johannes Radig 44:15
Thinking about yeah, thinking about jobs to be done also really helps to identify who are you actually competing with? So you know, maybe there’s not another software that does the same thing that you told us or that we do. But obviously, there are other ways to solve the problem. So for example, some agency owners may say, well, actually, I like spending time with the client and walking them through, which is hard at scale. But there might be some argument to say, well, it’s actually not that waste of time, maybe some of them, while others may have hired a VA to do that job. But others may, you know, build a really fancy form that has loads of conditions depending on the setup that the client has to make that easy. So all of these are competitors to what we are doing and building, right? And often we see, I see founders, this is more the mentoring side that look at the following like, no, we don’t have competition or like it doesn’t. It’s impossible really. Right? Because everyone would have found a way to solve the problem to some extent, maybe not perfectly, you know, without a solution that indie hackers building, whatever is building basically, yeah.
Arvid Kahl 45:23
Yeah. I think everything has competition, like even like Disney Plus or Netflix. Their competition isn’t necessarily the other big cloud streaming video providers. Their competition is you having something else to do. Like you having, you know, you wanting to go play sports or hang out with your family, that is competition for them as well, attention competition. That’s a very interesting point. Do you use all these many different things, which I bet there are many of? You just set forums, people probably email back and forth, they do these kind of virtual hangouts and walking people through. Do you use that in your own like search engine marketing or your pay per click marketing? Any kind of paid, that you explicitly look for people who try to find other ways that you can pull them into your own world?
Johannes Radig 46:05
Great question. Yeah, yes. Yes, of course, We try to, right? We try to, so obviously, we do a lot of SEO. So obviously, my background is SEO. This is also interesting. We actually didn’t do so much SEO in the beginning because I was like, well, it doesn’t seem to be so much around this, but actually then I wrote maybe one really good article and it’s started to rank at some point and get quite a lot of traffic. And we’re like, oh, maybe we should do more. So yeah, now we’ll be doing a lot more SEO and I highly recommend it to anyone out there, even if you think that there’s not a lot of traffic around what you’re solving, there will be to some. Like, at least the people that you’re trying to find, they will be searching for something. So we have a lot of topics around what agencies are, what problems they’re facing when they’re growing or automating, for example, that’s an area. We have loads of guides on how to give or request access to all the platforms you can imagine. So that’s pretty straightforward. And maybe we should have more on like, how to hire VA and then, you know, touch into that. But yeah, so and also in our ads as well, right? We try to make them feel this pain point, show them some kind of videos of people getting being in despair, looking at their Facebook business manager. So this was actually our first ad was me scrolling through Facebook business manager, like getting like, some kind of getting angry and sad about it at the same time. And it worked really well. So yeah.
Arvid Kahl 47:41
It’s really cool to hear and I’m just seeing like, a very interesting journey here from you just finding something that you were really good at, which is the whole ads space, right? Building something for lead gen, figuring out this is not enough, talking to people, learning about their deepest need, which is not even just about onboarding. It’s about relationship building and then building something that they really want to use because it gives them something to project towards their own customers. That is an amazing journey. And what sticks out to me, what stands out to me is that it took every single step along the way to get to where you are today. I think that is something that we often forget, right? As indie hackers, we always think we have the perfect solution. We have everything we need. But it takes all this experimentation and stuff along the way. It’s very cool. What is next for Leadsie? Where are you going to go from here? Are you just going to grow and just turn these 4000 a week into a 40,000 a week? Or are you going to expand? Where do you want to go with that?
Johannes Radig 48:48
Also, really good question. So yesterday, we did a hackathon. That’s super interesting, first time we did that. So about a slightly different way of using our tool for influence of whitelisting, for example. So if anyone was listening and you’re interested in influencer whitelisting and is using some tool on our tool or whatever, please reach out to me. But so anyway, my point is we have a lot of ideas of things that really excite us and we believe are going to add value to agencies and possibly also to brands or other companies in general. But we also have some SaaS that are using us in some way. So it’s not just agencies, but the core is agencies still. There are a lot of other integrations that we want to integrate with or platforms we want to support. So that’s always straightforward. But the cool thing is, even after basically four years since the very inception of Leadsie, which took some turns but we’re still super excited to work on it and I think that’s really fun and great and there’s gonna be some cool things that are gonna come for sure. You should watch the space.
Arvid Kahl 50:01
Yeah, I was gonna say where do I go to watch the space? Where do you want people who are not just interested in Leadsie. I would love, I’m gonna put the link to Leadsie in there because I think it’s a really, really interesting indie product to begin with that solves real problems for real people. I love this kind of stuff. But if people want to follow the journey of the business and your journey, where do you want them to go?
Johannes Radig 50:19
Perfect. Yeah, I mean, so for Leadsie, checkout leadsie.com. And for myself, I am on Twitter. I’m nowhere nearly as successful as someone else on this conversation here. So now I so yeah, check me out @joradig is my handle. I’m sure Arvid is going to link that in the show notes. And you can get in touch with me there or LinkedIn if you want. But yeah, these are the main places to find me.
Arvid Kahl 50:57
I highly recommend it. It’s really cool. I’m really glad that we got to have this conversation. I think I learned a lot from you today. I hope you had a couple opportunities to think about where you come from and like how, again, how important all these steps are. I think like looking back in retrospect, it’s really cool to see what is needed to build a successful business. So thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom, all your insights and those a lot of tiny little tips for indie hackers to improve many different aspects of their work. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show.
Johannes Radig 51:31
Big pleasure, Arvid. Thank you so much for having me.
Arvid Kahl 51:34
And that’s it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you’re a founder who’s built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That’s the dream of every SaaS founder, right? The problem is, you’re not growing for whatever reason, maybe it’s lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest, you don’t know. You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach. They really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who’s facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn’t look different every time is a story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don’t do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It’s certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They’ve helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it’s me and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It’s always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It’d be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people’s feeds. And that’s, I think where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
