Indie Dads Podcast - 10 Episodes and 1000+ downloads later: AMA...

How it all started

It seems like an age ago now, but back in July, @PocketBryan decided to quit his full-time job in pursuit of bootstrapping a business full time.

Lesson 1: Have the courage to reach out to like-minded people

Bryan was building in public, and I noticed he was building a very similar product to mine in the freelancer invoicing space, so I reached out to him via twitter DM and pitched an idea for sharing lessons learnt and resources in a notion document, even though we were technically competitors.
This gave us a chance to get to know each other without any commitment on either side.

Lesson 2: Build in public

A week or 2 in, Bryan mentioned in one of his "watch me as I build my product" youtube videos that he was thinking of starting a podcast. Around the same time, I'd finally got around to publishing an MVP for Remotime, and was thinking of ways to get out of the "coding cave" and be a little more involved in the maker community. A podcast seemed like a great way to do that.
I pitched the idea of hosting a bootstrapping topic podcast from the viewpoint of 'competitors' building products while putting family-first. Bryan loved the idea, and the indie dads podcast was born :)

In retrospect, the 'indie dads' name may have been a marketing mistake, as our target audience isn't only dads, but all indie maker parents - but we now have the domain / podcast setup, so we're running with it.

Lesson 3: Just ship

On Aug 9 2021, we published our first episode. We didn't have the sound sorted out yet, and we didn't really know what the format would be.
Bryan bought the domain, and threw together some graphics around our theme of "indie dads". Neither of us had any podcasting experience, so we just jumped on Zencastr and recorded an introduction. First episode done.

Lesson 4: Let your audience know

We pushed 'publish', and Bryan immediately posted about it here on indie hackers. The response was way better than we expected :)
We made sure to try and respond to everyone who left a comment. The result was 96 downloads in the first 7 days of publishing.
We've tried posting about it on Hacker News and some reddit forums (where permitted), and the result has been a mixed bag.

We're now 10 episodes in (episode 10 is in edit as of this writing) and really enjoying the opportunity that this podcast has afforded us to engage with our fellow indie makers.
Bryan has since moved on from freelancing products and joined an existing bootstrapped company with all-new challenges.
I'm still in the midst of trying to balance a full-time job + family + building + marketing on an average of an hour a day.

Plans for 2022

We're on a break for the next few weeks to focus on our families, but we're starting up again early 2022.
We would definitely like to hear more from our fellow indie parents, so if you're interested in appearing as a guest - or have any guest suggestions, drop us a line!

To all our listeners - thank you for your feedback and tuning in!
If you haven't given us a listen - head on over to indiedads.com, and let us know what you think.

Got any questions? Drop us a line in the comments!