What Works for Startups Like Yours?

Dr. Sheri Walling, a psychologist and entrepreneur, launched her book 'Touching Two Worlds: A Guide for Finding Hope in the Landscape of Loss' which explores grief through personal essays, tactical practices, and psychological analysis. The book shares her experience losing her father to cancer and brother to suicide six months apart, while simultaneously experiencing career success and family flourishing. She executed a multi-month launch strategy starting with endorsement outreach in November, a circus-themed launch event in May, and an ongoing podcast tour with systematic outreach to contacts and media platforms.

Lenny's Podcast is a top 10 technology podcast that launched six months before this episode with 50 episodes published, 2+ million downloads, and 40,000-50,000 subscribers across Apple Podcasts and Spotify globally. The podcast interviews world-class product leaders and growth experts on building and growing successful products, using Notion to coordinate operations and guest management.

MicroConf's State of Independent SaaS Survey is a community-driven research initiative focused on indie-funded SaaS founders. The annual report provides benchmarks, insights, and best practices to level the playing field between bootstrapped and venture-funded SaaS businesses. It leverages the indie SaaS community to gather data and create actionable intelligence for independent founders.

All the Hacks is a top-tier business podcast launched by Chris Hutchins, a former PM and founder who left Wealthfront to pursue content creation full-time. The podcast explores financial optimization, travel hacks, and life improvement through interviews with interesting people. In 18 months, it reached top 5-10 in business podcast rankings through authentic content, guest curation, and consistent weekly releases.

First customers: Kevin Rose's podcast announcement and organic audience from existing newsletter

Tracy Osborn self-published Hello Web Design, a book teaching design fundamentals to non-designers, after launching it successfully on Kickstarter (raising $22,000). She later partnered with No Starch Press to republish it as a hardcover, shifting from self-publishing to a traditional publisher to offload marketing while maintaining her evergreen content. The book focuses on 80/20 design principles like typography, color, spacing, and layout that enable developers and founders to design interfaces themselves.

Arvid Kahl, founder of the bootstrapped Feedback Panda (which reached $60k/month before being sold), transitioned into content creation and wrote 'The Embedded Entrepreneur,' a handbook on building audience-driven businesses. The book launched at #1 on Product Hunt and was collaboratively developed with 550 alpha readers through HelpThisBook, demonstrating the core principle of the book itself: audience-first product development.

First customers: Twitter audience and Product Hunt launch

Huberman Lab is a free educational podcast and content platform launched in January 2021 by neuroscientist and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman. Within 10 months of launch, the channel became one of the top 10 most popular podcasts globally, with the first video reaching 652,000 views and subsequent videos hitting 1+ million views. The growth was driven by consistent weekly content, word-of-mouth from major podcast appearances, and a commitment to free, science-backed health and wellness education.

Josh Comeau built CSS for JavaScript Developers, an interactive online course combining videos, articles, widgets, and mini-games to help JS developers master CSS. He validated the idea with a one-week pre-order campaign targeting $50k in sales and instead generated $550k in revenue from nearly 5,000 sales. His success came from building in public on Twitter, maintaining a high-quality blog that attracts 60-90k monthly visitors, and leveraging an email list of 20k subscribers.

First customers: Email to waitlist during pre-order week

Gergé Oros is a former Uber engineering manager who left his $320-330k compensation package to build The Pragmatic Engineer, a paid newsletter on Substack about software engineering. In under a year, the newsletter grew to 189,000 subscribers (with 80,000 added in the last 90 days) and now generates more revenue than his former Uber salary, with subscribers paying for in-depth weekly content.

CJ built Mostly Metrics, a newsletter for CFOs launched in December 2020, starting from zero subscribers by obsessively engaging on Twitter around relevant keywords and partnering with B2B companies like Ramp and Brex. The newsletter grew to 35,000 subscribers (7,000 of whom are actual CFOs) in 1.5 years with a 46% open rate and 5-7% click-through rate, attracting sponsorships of $5-10k per post and up to $100k for bundled deals. He also launched a podcast called Run the Numbers with Turpentine Network while maintaining his full-time role as CFO at Parts Tech, planning to transition fully to media within three years.

First customers: Twitter outreach and partnerships with B2B companies (Ramp, DataRails) willing to partner for free initially to build audience