How Indie Hackers was the inception of my founder coaching platform

"$1M from 3 successful startups in just 24 months"

We've all heard that story on Twitter, haven't we? That one founder who dropped everything at their $250K/year job, to bootstrapped their own startup(s) from their home and BAM, they're at the legendary $83,333 mark.

That's what got me pretty sad tbh, when I learned about all this. It was confusing, and quite frankly felt well outside my reach when I started learning about "founders" 3 years ago.

I had spent half my life wanting to be reach, and that entire time I had no idea how to be that person. And then one day, I decided to change my mindset.

And fun fact, it all started on IndieHackers.com! The reason I'm writing this post for you guys is that one of our best founders (clients) got interviewed by IH this week, and it really motivated me to get back on the horse and create quality content for you folks here. His name is Louis and I sincerely recommend you check out his story of how he's building his own startup! I used to write a lot on IndieHackers in the past, like this one article about how to live frugally as a founder.

How it all started

After multiple google searches, I realized that IH had a small but concentrated community of startup founders who're trying to build companies they'll be proud of one day. But tbh, I was still pretty lost. Didn't really understand how exactly to start a business from just reading blog posts.

I spent weeks actually, just trying to figure out what to create, who to make it for, etc. and had multiple conversations with other founders/wannabe founders. But I wasn't... really seeing the path forward.

But that... was the thing. If I didn't know how to create a startup from scratch, there must be others who felt the same way. And so I thought why not create a way for early-stage founders to get mentored by others who've built successful companies!? And that's how the idea of Sparrow (my founder coaching platform) was born.

Creating the team

Naturally, when creating a marketplace like Sparrow, you need to fill have mentors or coaches as I call them, to be able to help out the earlier stage founders. And guess where I found our first mentor?

That's right, on IndieHackers.com. The first coach we ever onboarded was a super fun guy called Jeff Ponchick, who bootstrapped his company from $0 to millions, and then raised funding to ultimately reach $10M+ in MRR (yep you read that right) before exiting to SoundCloud.

What a freaking story.

When Jeff wrote his story here on IndieHackers, I read it and immediately sent him a longggg email to him asking him to be a coach on Sparrow lol. And to my surprise, he was open to it! :)

Jeff has also been very kind to me, and on numerous occasions helped me figure out how to build out Sparrow, how coaching sessions should be structured, what things to avoid, etc. Guess you could say he's been a coach to me hah.

He was the first coach on our platform who helped me get the first transaction, which was I think $75USD for an hour's time with a founder from Greece. This was years ago so no, you can't have him for that price anymore haha.

I am nothing but grateful to him for that.

\## Scaling revenue and the team
After reading some guidelines for growing companies, I realized I have to re-create our coaching offers to (a) make more money for myself (b) help the coaches get paid better and (c) work with founders who're heads-down into building their companies like Louis ;)

Fast forward 2 years, we now offer monthly coaching sessions with phone calls and emails with the coach best fit for you (I'm the matchmaker) and it starts from $500USD. But the path to this wasn't always clear.

It wasn't clear until I met another coach, yet again, on IndieHackers (there's a theme here guys). And his name was Elliot Boucher.

This man has scaled his own company from $0 to over $2M ARR, and the reason I like him a lot is because he's a non-technical founder. And so for a lot of you folks on IndieHackers who're very technical, he opens your mind up to the not-so-obvious parts of scaling your company i.e., thinking about product, marketing and growth all together, instead of only focusing on what YOU as a founder love doing -- remember, that when building a company, it's much less about you and more about the customer. Much, much, much more about the customers you and your product serve.

Needless to say, Elliot has also been very kind to me in my journey of building Sparrow. And most of our testimonials are all about him lol. Well, him and another coach but that's a story for another time.

Why I'm grateful to Indiehackers.com

Without the site and its people, I would have been a lost cause LOL. Like, really. No sugar coating. Finding the signal amidst the noise is really tough, unless you're following the right CEOs/investors on Twitter or reading the right Substacks/Mediums. But also --

Guess it's pretty obvious now that I've dogfooded my own product and have found tons of benefits from it over the last 2 years, and I sincerely advise you to do the same -- even if it's without my help at Sparrow! Find a founder who is 10x higher in revenue than you, and ask them your dumb questions. Meet them once every 2 months for an hour. Send them bi-weekly email updates (with their permission).

This will have an outrageous benefit on you as a person (forcing you to evolve) and on finding loopholes in your startup so you can patch them and find ways to grow quicker.

If you needed a driving instructor to drive at 100mph, what makes you so confident you won't need one when reaching $1000MRR? Coaching is subconsciously baked into most high-risk parts of our lives. And if you're not giving yourself the opportunity to seek the guidance you really need, are you not doing yourself an injustice?

Wrapping up

I want to sign off with a few tips for you if you're under $20K MRR, based on what I've seen working:

• Always, always read. Whether it's a book on building lean startups or a newsletter from your favorite founder or just tweets - make sure to keep educating yourself on net new stuff every 2-3 weeks. Consistency is key. Reading one proper article a week without fail, is better than reading 10 tweets on Monday, and then maybe one article late Friday, and then not doing jack the next week. Don't fall back. Keep up.
• Do not be shy to ask for help. Again, whether it's through my baby Sparrow or something else, be open to ask for help from founders (try to avoid consultants or big tech bros) who are building within your industry and have had the same types of challenges as you. Sometimes, even an email from them with 3-4 sentences around your challenge, can save your hours and days of pain. Trust me. Been there.
• Marathon not a sprint. Don't wear yourself out. Be hard on yourself. Hold yourself to a higher degree of quality. Do not let anything ruin your integrity. All this is key, yes. But that doesn't mean you need to hurt your mental and physical health. Building a business is a 4-12 year gameplan. But missing your son's birthday this week will not help you build 10x more revenue (conditions may apply ha).

Love y'all very much. Keep building. Keep growing. And keep spreading kindness. There's not much of it to go around anymore.