Building a financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson

Building a financial engine for your indie business - Justin Jackson

Author: James McKinven November 1, 2023 Duration: 15:48

In this episode I have a returning guest, someone who is a keystone of the bootstrapping community, it’s Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor, MegaMaker and more. Today we have an unstructured but very useful chat about building a financial engine for your business. This is a topic that has come up countless times in my indie journey and I think it’s something that a lot of indie businesses don’t address as early and seriously as they should. There a ton of actionable tips in this conversation about how to manage your finances, building a solid, profitable business and what to do when things aren’t going well.

Get the extended episode here: https://indiebites.com/membership

Timestamps

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 01:45 James shocked by tax
  • 02:31 Profit first
  • 06:51 Building a financial engine
  • 09:40 Things falling apart with depression
  • 11:00 Desperation affects creativity
  • 11:49 How to build your financial engine

Recommendations (from prev ep)

Follow Justin

My links

Sponsor - EmailOctopus 🐙

EmailOctopus is an independently owned email marketing platform, built to support other small growing businesses. With a focus on affordability and ease of use, EmailOctopus contains all of the features you need to reach and grow your audience. You can start today, with their industry leading free plan where you can contact up to 2,500 subscribers without paying a penny



Every Tuesday, James McKinven sits down for a short chat with someone who’s quietly building a business on their own terms. Indie Bites focuses on the real, often messy, beginnings of profitable, bootstrapped ventures. Instead of abstract theory, you’ll hear founders explain the exact moment an idea clicked, the scrappy ways they tested it without spending a fortune, and how they landed those crucial first few customers. The conversations are deliberately kept concise, getting straight to the practical insights that make a difference when you’re starting with limited time and resources. This podcast digs into the specifics of creating a sustainable income independently, covering the intersection of entrepreneurship, marketing, and hands-on business tactics. It’s for anyone who prefers learning from direct experience rather than corporate playbooks, offering a regular dose of motivation and actionable advice from people who are actually doing the work.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Indie Bites
Podcast Episodes
Growing Frontend Mentor to 500k users and $30k MRR - Matt Studdert [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:02
Matt Studdert is the founder of Frontend Mentor, which helps people level up their front-end coding skills by building projects. They have over 500,000 users and are hovering around $30k MRR. Matt didn’t start out wantin…
Growing a $2m p/y indie business - Josh Ho, Referral Rock [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:30
Josh Ho is the founder and CEO of Referral Rock, a SaaS he founded in 2014 doing over $2m a year in revenue. Referral Rock helps businesses to design, launch and manage a customer referral program. Josh has had decades o…
Building a 6-figure creator business - Jay Clouse, Creator Science [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:31
Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, which is a membership, community, newsletter and podcast helping you become build a creator business, which he bootstrapped to over $40k a month towards the end of last year.…
Breaking Convention: The Radical Thinking of Jack McDade and Statamic [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:25
Jack McDade is the creator of Statamic, a content management system for Laravel. What I love about Jack is how he approaches all of his projects, including Statamic, to just be different. There is so much cookie cutter c…