we ended up getting about 2,000 Mr after that and you know I was young and I thought I had made it so not too long after that I quit my job hello and welcome back to Indie bikes the podcast robing you stories of fellow Indie hackers in 50 minutes or less I'm your host James mvan and I'm trying to make my own Indie business work as a podcast producer and founder of a handmade leather wallet business today I'm joined by Jeffrey bun who is the co-founder of clear fall a digital journaling app he built with his wife Maria previously they co-founded me Li a meal planning app which grew to a whopping 65k Mr before they exited in 2018 in this episode we cover the story of founding both apps how they utilize the app stores for growth and why they started the BTC app in a crowded Market Jeffrey was actually introduced to me by my longterm sponsor email octopus and boy am I glad they did this is a great story but let me tell you about email octopus before we get into the episode there are an email platform focused on affordability with a very generous free plan and ease of use without all of those bloated features that some email apps have so you can focus on shipping and growing your audience which regular listeners will know is essential for growth in the early days so to get started with an email platform that gets out of the way you can contact up to 2500 people for free head to email.com or hit the link in the show notes now Jeffrey and I chat for an hour so I've uploaded the extended version of this chat where we talk more about founding multiple companies with his wife why he wished he took more time off after his exit and we dive into the specifics of how to grow in that business you can access this chat on the Indie B members ship for $60 a year head to Indie bites.com membership let's get into this chat Jeffrey welcome to the Pod how are you doing thanks for having me James I'm doing well now I have the pleasure of being your first ever podcast which means we can tell the whole story what you've been up to and quite frankly I don't know how this story hasn't been covered because you've bootstrapped a company to a great M number and then exited and then started something else you've also gone from non-technical to technical how do people know not know you now you started M Li in 2013 so 10 years ago and you did it with your wife Maria where does Maria come into this but Maria and I were dating only for I think nine or 10 months when we decided to start a business together so that's a huge decision was she Your Wife by then or were you just dating no no so we've been together about 12 years now and she's only been my wife for about 4 months so oh wow so we were together for a long time before uh doing that next step and what were your goals with MIM and did you leave your job to do this or was it just going to be a nice side bre side project for you again the theme would be not a whole lot of thought about all these things at the time but I also remember when Maria and I discussed the idea and we were just talking about the problem of like cooking simple healthy meals really hard and especially for like for one or two people at the time both of us were completely non-technical the first product was a WordPress site and uh we would cook the meals we wouldn't even photograph them and we would send them once a week as PDFs to our customers along with the grocery list so super Bare Bones and the thing that really I guess was a catalyst for things to come is is we were trying to Market you know we had one or two customers really small and I wrote a guest post on Life Hacker that ended up doing spectacularly well we gave away three months of me Li uh for free to anybody that signed up uh we had 4,000 people sign up for this extended free trial so at the end of it we gave like a big discount we tried to convert these people and we ended up getting about 2,000 Mr after that and you know I was young and I thought I had made it so not too long after that I quit my job that's crazy you quit your job not long after TK yeah um I still worked as a contractor for a while I had about 10K in savings I moved into Maria's parents basement to save on rent so that was a full experience in itself but then we just grinded it out and tried to grow it unsuccessfully for a long time but we tried a lot and then eventually it started to work what were you thinking at this point was this going to be something that you could turn into a big business did you want to raise and go down that route or was it hold on we're on to something here we can build as a nice lifestyle business for ourselves I think it was more the latter you know we had this like 2K Mr we did grow it a little bit over the years but mostly we kept our burn extraordinarily low you know wasn't the most fun time but uh we were alive that's interesting that you say it wasn't as fun I feel like starting a company because of the extra risk that you're taking on you should do everything you can to try and make it fun and give you the freedom that you want or desire and I think early in the early days you get a lot more freedom from just having a regular job than you do from starting a company especially bootstrapping a company were you just happy going along with this not being fun or was that like a real challenge for you where you had times where you thought I'm not sure we can do this I'm not sure this is viable I had a lot of those thoughts I'm sure we'll talk about clear full and journaling later but I was journaling at the time so looking back on those entries now like some of them are are literally titled depression but you know that's not to say like we had a lot of good times and every time we tried a new launch our or a new marketing campaign or a new feature it was always exciting and again I'm sure we'll talk about like building as a couple or even just as a co-founder but if you have somebody like when you're low you know they're high and you can kind of even each other out like that is so helpful the bad times are when you're both low but for us at least those don't tend to last very long and I've read somewhere that you had a third co-founder is that right and where did that come come in so he came on later Marie and I started it and ran it for two or three years and we just heard a ton of feedback unsurprisingly from our customers that they wanted customization so we thought okay we need to build a tech product he worked initially as a contractor a little bit for equity and a little bit at a lower hourly rate so that was great for us at the time and we initially built a a web app and I think at the time we managed to grow our Mr to around 5K after we launched that so it it was working but again just not enough especially with three people we kind of made a it felt at the time very risky decision to Pivot to mobile kind of leave out the web app and uh drastically cut our prices I think we cut our Mr by 2third at a single moment because we just lowered it for everybody and then we launched an iOS and later Android and that's when the business really worked it felt like we had the right like a product Channel fit at that point like this was the channel that people wanted to find the product you know you can't bring your laptop to the grocery store and check off your grocery list like there's a lot in the product that made sense for mobile looking back at the time we didn't know if it would work you know people were asking for it and it ended up working yeah I mean a good indication is people asking for it but that is a big decision that is a big risk but I guess you understood your market and what they were willing to pay for and that led to a lot more growth for you is that about right I think that's about right but also you you could probably make the the argument that not making a change like that was the bigger risk because we'd seen this trajectory for so long things weren't necessarily working that well uh we needed the company to do better so you know we made a very big change talk growth to me Jeffrey you went through quite a large amount of growth over the next few years uh you grew it to 1.3 million users those are that's a huge number and 13,000 paying customers to around 60 65 K what things did you do to grow this mobile out I mean honestly looking back we were in the right place at the right time time so we launched an iOS we happened to get featured by Apple in the first week we had 30,000 users but more importantly we ranked for Search terms so ASO apps for optimization just like SEO on the web you know you try to rank for various terms some have more traffic some are more difficult and uh just over the years we just grew and we kind of solidified in one of those top positions and by the end of it I think we were getting about a thousand new organic users per platform per day so we didn't really have to worry about acquisition we focused a lot more a little deeper in the funnel on activating those users on retaining them on you know getting Revenue that kind of thing let's talk about the exit for you you exited through private Equity who bought your shares of the business was this something that you were sort of actively pursuing or is it an opportunity that sort of fell into you came your way at the time we were pursuing it I mean candidly there were Team Dynamics issues over the years Mar and I were kind of burned out uh another part of it is I kind of felt a little bit powerless you know having a tech product and being completely non-technical that that always just bugged me you know I wanted to learn the tech but there was always something else to do in the business so for a lot of reasons we decided to explore you know what would look like if all of us sold if one of us or two of us sold that kind of thing and at the end of the day Maria and I ended up selling our shares and we moved on after you exited this did give you a bit of freedom and time afterwards but MIM have been your life how did you spend those next few months afterwards we decided that we would we would have a couple years where we wouldn't worry about earning and and we could do other projects uh I do wish that we had taken some time off I jumped into learning programming almost right away and just beat my head against the desk every day for years and you know I wanted to build stuff and I wanted to feel in in control of it both of us knew that we wanted to do it all over again you know and being able to build products would be critical to do that now I put a comment under here saying why why learn software engineering sounds unnecessary with the skill sets that you have in marketing custom support product but you said earlier that it was frustrating for you knowing that you couldn't fix some of the product things and I feel like that was a deep frustration for you and was something that you wanted to solve so how did you go about learning software engineering first thing I did I jumped into the courses you know like free code camp but then I started to try to build an app and I was like what the hell do I do like I remember I would spent days trying to get the lter to work which is not even necessary to to build an app but really I don't know I I think it was have a problem Google it try different things problem solved and now you're on to the next problem and that really hasn't stopped for years um so that that was just it you know a lot of Googling a lot of iteration and eventually trying to build an app I think was the best way to learn and that's actually how clear fall came about so clearall talk to me about it where did the idea come from and how did you start building this I had journaled for many years and I thought okay I'll make a web app because that's easier than Mobile in some sense but then we stepped back and thought you know what maybe there's opportunity here you know we did have a ton of experience in the App Stores we did a lot of research competitor research we looked at the various journaling apps I hadn't been happy with some apps for a while and then we just dove in it was actually a very similar route that we took with me we had a web app you know we created a mobile app and that's kind of where it it took off and seems to be repeating itself so what were you doing differently with a journaling app there were a lot of apps that were very much just free form writing not much in terms of guidance and on the other end of the spectrum there were a lot of really specialized journaling apps that we either only guided or really restrictive or really about a a specific topic so idea was kind of marrying those Concepts talk to me about some of the growth you've seen from Clear fo has it been following a similar Playbook to MIM has in using the app store and then specifically growing through that and also how have the App Store changed over this decade really since you started MIM can you sort follow the same playbooks or I'm guessing it's changed a fair bit so we thought we could follow the same Playbook and the stores have changed dramatically keywords are much more competitive nowadays there's way more apps the algorithms themselves have changed like recently we just had an app of the day feature which is a huge honor I think we had a thousand extra signups that day whereas I know years ago you'd get 50,000 signups or more so like it has completely changed now it feels like what you have to do is drive your own traffic to the app stores which will signal to the algorithm that your app is popular which will boost You In Search terms and it's this virtuous cycle but you need to own that acquisition piece yourself and that was a bit of a rude awakening for us because we you know we thought we could follow that Playbook and it it really hasn't turned out that way so it's been difficult so over two years you've passed 100K Revenue but like that's not enough to really sustain two people do you still I'm I'm guessing you still have runway in the bank do you know how far you're going to push that or if you think clear can start to kick up where it's going to be able to provide both you a good living well that's the question and that's uh what causes a lot of my low points but we're not burning anymore we still both believe in the vision and mission for Clear fall we do think it could be a really big business we both just have to get way more on marketing because a lot of this time we've been building the product to feature par or or close to it and a lot of it is I'm a new developer so I'm rewriting a lot of things that were just built so horribly is just awful so so that's made us a little bit slower I don't have you know a hard and fast answer as to what the next year or two will look like in terms of finances but you got to be optimistic I end every episode on three recommendations a book a podcast and Indie Hacker no explanation required what have you got for me a book it's a range by David Epstein podcast I listen to a ton of podcasts if I had to choose one I like conversations with Tyler Indie hackers so there are a few on Twitter this guy I've seen recently his name is Sebastian R I have a friend Brian dubno he built a workout app I use every day called bolt and one more Maria goova who happens to be my wife who doesn't get nearly enough credit and I think she's brilliant and I think she should be out there more absolutely Jeffrey thank you so much for coming on this episode of Indie bites Thanks James appreciate it thank you for listening to this episode of Indie bites with Jeffrey bun if you enjoy this and want to hear more the full 55 minute conversation is available on the Indie bites membership they you can get access to Indie bites.com membership with holiday season in full swing this is probably your last chance you can get your hands on one of my handmade bullets for a loved one or for yourself and again thank you to my awesome sponsor Iman octopus that's all from me see you next week