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In-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.
Welcome back after a hiatus to Ramen FM, the show where we interview rum profitable founders from the Ramen Club community and how they discovered, built, and grew their product to Ramen profitability and beyond. My guest today is a good friend, longtime Ram club member, Elston Barreto. He is a designer and developer from South London via Gower and the founder of TinyHost, the easiest way to host and share your work online, including HTML, PDFs, dot zip, PHP, and I'm sure much more to come very soon. TinyHost has grown to over 400 k ARR in the past three years, almost entirely via SEO. Elston, how are you doing?
Elston:Good. Good. Nice to be back on here.
Charlie:You just got back from San Francisco. Right? What were you doing out there?
Elston:I did. I was not going to raise money as everyone seemed to think. I was just trying curious to connect with people and, you know, see what Silicon Valley shipping really is like. So London is a really cool hotspot for tech in Europe, but SF is supposed to be the next kind of level.
Charlie:I'd love for you to take us back to the moment you originally decided to build TinyHost. What problem were you seeing that others weren't addressing? What kind of thought process was happening at the time?
Elston:Yeah. I mean, I did an unconventional route, I think, to to ideation. That is zero market research. If I did, I probably wouldn't have come with this idea. I basically wanted to solve my own itch.
Elston:And what I thought at the time was that it was too difficult to host things online. And I knew that if you were technical and you knew how to use s three and you had maybe, you know, an hour or two, and I've done this before for previous companies that I've worked it, where you can basically set up a static, you know, host in a few hours and then you have like very cheap and accessible hosting that's super reliable and easy to use. But for me, I thought it would be very complex for the layman. So I said, if we automated it, would people really like that and find it useful? And that was the first version of it.
Elston:It it was actually tailored towards technical people. And, yeah, from there, I took it to a bigger level. I remember actually demoing it. I think the third ever Indie Beers on my phone to, a few people and being like, oh, this is like my new project. And everyone's like, oh, this is super cool.
Elston:And it was like a small, yeah, little side project at the time and now it's blown up to very, very big company and useful tool for people, so very proud of everything so far.
Charlie:I remember that back then and you sharing it in the Slack community and stuff like that. And it's one of those things that early on it seems like a toy, but Yeah. I did think that a few people thought there was something a bit more to it even back then kind of thing. And so it was always super cool. And when you when you discovered it, when you came decided to actually build this, were you in the process of kind of building something else and thought, oh, I was I thought, wish there was an easy way to host this, or did you just kind of think, oh, it would be great if this existed, like independently of that?
Elston:Yeah. No. I wasn't in a process or anything. I I I effectively went into a full time job so I could rebuild from the side basically again. And I was looking for, you know, ideas and things that would make sense.
Elston:And this came out of, yeah, issues in the past basically with previous roles actually, and I had a domain kind of expertise around that to to figure out how to do it. But it wasn't, yeah, a problem I was solving right then and there. And it's just a a little tool I wanted to see, you know, what people would do it. And even myself, didn't know how big it could be. That's why I I cheaped out and I bought the cheaper domain, tiny with two eyes, which was, like, 90% cheaper than the one I one.
Elston:And then I bought the one with one eye, which cost me a lot more later down the road. But, yeah, it goes to show, like, even I didn't really know what it would be.
Charlie:And from this, what kind of lessons do you think people can take on how to identify good startup opportunities based on, a similar framework?
Elston:Yeah. Height insight is an amazing thing. Right? So like, if it's a a validated space right now, there are users basically in that space. I think that's a really, really good signal to build something, especially if it's your first company, you wanna make it easy.
Elston:The hardest thing is trying to validate an idea. I mean, building companies is difficult as it is, but it's even harder if you don't even know people want what you are building and made a mistake in the past. And in hindsight, I was I'm in the hosting space. Right? I never went out with that kind of idea, but the hosting market is huge.
Elston:It's it's a multibillion pound company that's been around for decades, basically. And all I did was take something that was existing, modernize it, simplify it, save people time and money in certain cases. And it was a success. I think like if you can save people time or money or modernize something, bring it to current trends and, ways that people use, you know, devices or AI. It's a it's a sure kind of success.
Charlie:So take something in a big well known market and modern modernize it, save people time and money, try and do Yeah. One or more of those things. I think that's a good framework. A question I have as well is you were working on this for, like, quite a long time before it started to get real traction, and you kind of worked on it consistently. You weren't running, like, loads of experiments or small bets or whatever.
Charlie:Some people do, like, 12 startups in twelve months, or they say, oh, yeah. You just need to throw up a Stripe link and see if anyone buys it, and that's the way to validate it. And you did none of that. You had an idea. You believed in it.
Charlie:You spent twelve months improving and growing it. So when do you think it's better to do what you're doing versus that kind of other more scrappy experimental approach? Do you think it's ever a time to do that other approach?
Elston:Honestly, like now looking at different ways that people have built successful businesses, some of my friends have gone down that route. I already think it's a personal preference and that you have to do it based on your own character and risk propensity and where you like to deal with stuff. For me, like the worst thing ever would be to try to juggle like multiple things at once. I'm like a, I'm way more of an all in kind of focused person than trying to jump about. And it worked really well.
Elston:And I think what made a success for me is I repositioned really early on. Right? So I launched Tiny basically as a technical tool, technical people to use it. And then a lot of people realized that I was trying to start comparing me with like Netlify and Vercel at the time and GitHub Pages, and they said, you know, what's different with you? And then I found a new market that basically never heard of those tools and they're pretty much non technical and they really liked it.
Elston:And so I repositioned to that, but if I hadn't have explored the different markets and marketed it to as many people as possible, I probably would have quit like in the first month, right? And so I do think there is something about going deep into a problem space, but remaining open as a strategy, as opposed to saying, you know, I'm gonna work on this for a month and then work another idea for a month because honestly, it took tiny about, you know, six, twelve months to really find a distribution channel and growth in needed to become a proper business. There were signs obviously, like in the beginning. So look out for that and use your gut to see if, you know, people, you know, like this or not. But it wasn't like one of those like crazy launches, Where thousands of people started using it, hundreds.
Elston:I remember putting on Reddit and had it like a few, first 100 people use it on Reddit, which was super cool. And so people did like that. And that kind of gave some motivation, but it wasn't consistent at all. They were kind of just peaks and troughs and then there's a product launch and posted on Slack communities and every now and then it kind of got some momentum, but it wasn't until I found a single distribution channel, it really worked. And that took time as well.
Elston:Like it takes time after, you know, trying everything to to get there.
Charlie:So you believed in it obviously yourself. You thought there was something in this, but you were also seeing signs of, like, traction from actual users who are using it, who are giving you good feedback and that kind of thing. And that was a big reason you kept going.
Elston:Yeah. A 100%. Honestly, like the project and the company was revolved around the core principle for me of learning how to market. So I realized that, you know, I could build a lot of cool things. You know, I had been a software engineer for, let's say, eight, nine years at that point in time.
Elston:And I basically realized that I could build stuff, I couldn't figure out how to, you know, get people to use it. And so I made it a a strict kind of strategy to build something and then just learn how to market stuff. So even if even if it wasn't a successful product, I would have learned how to do email outbound, YouTube videos, SEO, Reddit, and just go through different kind of strategies, and that would have been useful to me regardless.
Charlie:This neatly leads on to SEO because you seem to have this strategy from early on, and it started was it three years ago or a bit longer, four years now?
Elston:Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit longer than four or four years ago. Yeah.
Charlie:So since then, you've basically been focusing on building the products and SEO, like the two main thing. Obviously, there's lots of other stuff. And what kind of made you decide to, first of all, focus on a single channel mostly, and second of all, for that channel to be SEO?
Elston:Yeah. So I didn't focus on a single channel at the beginning. I literally spread very thinly across like, multiple channels. So I did everything from posts on Reddit, YouTube videos, Slack communities, directories, Twitter, SEO. Yeah.
Elston:It was not until I met Saba, a good friend at Indy Beers, and he said, you should try SEO, it's working really well for us. He said
Charlie:Saba who runs Veeds,
Elston:Yep, Saba runs Veed, yeah. And he said, it works really well for us, try it out, but it'll take you like six months. And I said, okay, let me try it out. And it wasn't until yeah, six months later where I started to see just organic traffic coming through. And it's basically because Google started putting some of our one of our pages in the top, you know, five or 10 results basically.
Elston:And with that came organic customers as well, which is cool. So like, for the first maybe six, seven months we had customers, but it was like around ten, twenty customers basically, not per month, but just in total for that first year. And so it was a real like, you know, drag to get those customers, but then things just start organically working after that. And when that you you saw signs of that channel just magnitudes larger than anything else. That was that was a really cool sign to to focus on double down this.
Elston:And of course, of the things tied in as well, like YouTube videos actually helped the SEO kind of platform. And even YouTube took a long time. I mean, like one video I created, it only took like a year to really start trending. And after a year, it started getting three, four, 5,000 views, and now it's like up to eighty, ninety thousand views. Some of these things just take time.
Charlie:To what extent are you starting to see traffic coming from recommendations from language models like ChatGPT, Claude, that kind of stuff. I get the impression it might be early days for a lot of people, but people are saying it's noticeably kind of increasing for a lot of people.
Elston:Yeah. It it's it's it's definitely becoming a bigger and bigger thing. I mean, Claude and all the LLMs have effectively been scraping, you know, search results for years. Right? And so if you had a heads up on SEO, you're effectively being recommended now through them.
Elston:And so I think it's probably mid last year, we were interviewing a user and they said they found us through ChatGPT, which is insane. So we we we do nothing and it's still very difficult to figure out, like, do you optimize for these LLMs? And I don't think you should at the moment, but it's effectively definitely becoming a recommendation tool for us, which is which is cool because we don't really know where SEO is is going to be in the next, you know, five to ten years. I don't use Google as much as I used to. So
Charlie:And so for some tactical level stuff, are there any specific tactics you use that you found were really effective for driving traffic? Was there a lot of experimentation there too?
Elston:Yeah. I mean, with SEO, there's kind of like three main kind of strategies. One is landing pages. So you're effectively looking at specific keywords and creating product pages for them. Like for us, it's like upload PDF.
Elston:Another one is tools. So creating side tools. So we have a tool called test HTML that's like doing really, really well. And the third is your blog effectively. Writing high quality content.
Elston:We still don't use AI for those articles, but producing regular content, you know, every week. And those together have really, really work well. But the key really is, you know, in in the the keyword analysis, finding the right topics, which is a bit of an art to figure out, but that's where the foundation start.
Charlie:What advice do you give other people in terms of when they've created a startup, and let's say they have some good signs that it's a good area to be in, it's a competitive market, how would you advise people to figure out what their main channel should be? Would would you say do what you did and try lots of stuff and see what sticks, or is is there any other kind of advice around that?
Elston:The I I really don't think there's like a silver bullet with this. I think it is about trying as much as you can. SEO won't really work for everybody. For example, if there aren't keyword volumes for what you're looking for, doesn't mean SEO is gonna work for you. But you can use some shortcuts in a way if you just look at what existing competitors in your field are doing.
Elston:Right? And the caveat is that you want to find out what they use really early on or like, you know, what maybe smaller companies are doing. Like if you're trying to build design software, don't look at Adobe because they're running TV ads and billboards. You can't do that. But maybe look at like a small design platform and see what they're doing.
Elston:Plus, when some of these big companies had launched certain distribution channels, one of the thing back then, and they're always evolving, Like now with TikTok and stuff like that. So look at what's trending with other SaaS apps, look at your competitors and also, try everything, but maybe you can filter by what's going around. And I think like SEO, know is really good for tools and use cases kind of thing, but like shorts and TikTok reels are really good for B2C use cases. So if you're creating like a consumer app or something like that. So there are playbooks around there, but I still think like trying lots of things can really help.
Charlie:What percentage of your new customers come from SEO now versus other channels that you do? Because you do a variety of things now. Right?
Elston:It's pretty high still. I think like, you know, 44% of traffic, largest majority basically comes from SEO. There's a lot again that comes through just brand awareness. People are obviously go straight to our website, but YouTube is our second biggest referral and it's like magnitudes less than than SEO. So SEO is still definitely like a big big driver of traffic for us.
Charlie:How do you find the conversion varies between these different sources though? Because I've heard from some people that while YouTube is kind of lower numbers, the conversion rate is actually surprisingly high.
Elston:YouTube is very, very high intent because it builds credibility. You see someone's face, hopefully. They guide you through a tutorial to do with their product and so you get a good feel for it and people just go and try it out. And so, yeah, I think YouTube is definitely high converting, but then if your SEO traffic is just so much larger, even with a low percentage, it's gonna be still be better than YouTube on pure stats, right? But we are trying to invest more in YouTube and growing that kind of channel.
Elston:But that's the other thing you gotta be aware of. Like some people talk about programmatic SEO, for example, that's really good at generating a lot of traffic, but it can be low quality traffic because you're just creating like thousands of landing pages, but people aren't necessarily bottom of funnel and ready to kind of use your product. So that's something to be aware of.
Charlie:I'd love to talk a little bit about how you've kind of managed your time through all of this because especially since you were working a full time job at the beginning and also balancing this in the evenings, and now you have a much larger company, you've got, like, a bigger team to manage. How did you kind of and that's divided between the earlier days and later days, but, like, how did you approach working on this with a full time job? Why did you decide to do that versus, say, just saving up and just going all in? These are, two slightly different approaches people take because, obviously, if you have funding, you just go all in. But without funding, use a few more options.
Charlie:You have to decide whether to kind of keep working your job or go part time or maybe just, like go all in and quit. What was that decision like for you?
Elston:Yeah. I mean, some people with without funding quit, which is amazing and like credit to them. But I think again, it it it's all down to your risk propensity, like individual character profile and how you see things. I mean for me, I really wanted to take the pressure off building something that I needed to kind of survive off effectively. And so it really was about just focusing on this app on the spare time, on my spare time and being able to have a day job.
Elston:And it was a job that wasn't too demanding, think, right? And that is super important as well. But there are benefits for running a business in the side. Number one, you basically cut the crap because you have few hours a day, few hours a week that you need to focus. And so what you don't do is spend an entire week trying to figure out a perfect logo and color scheme.
Elston:You just basically ship and you try to find customers, right? I mean, I know people that have spent like weeks basically on a logo and the company's never got anywhere, for example, trying to find like a design color scheme or something like that. So it really helps you focus and, you know, trim the fat. And then when the times are going rough, you can take a step away and still really continue to run the product because there were weeks where nothing was going right in the sense that it was very flat growth and no one was really upgrading and paying. And I was able to just take a step back and let it happen and come back with new kind of ideas and strategies and not feel like I need to make this happen in like a month or not.
Elston:But the downsides of that, it took a lot longer, you know, to get somewhere.
Charlie:Something that I think you are renowned for, Elsin, is hiring on a budget just being able to kind of scale yourself since also from a very early stage, you're kind of able to get in great freelancers and just figure out how to outsource this in a way where it's very efficient, basically. How early were you outsourcing stuff in the early days? And like, what's your kind of approach to and process of doing that?
Elston:Yeah. I mean, early on to be honest, because I I feel like when you don't have time, you hopefully have money. Right? Because you're working a job. And so you can use that money towards time.
Elston:And that just means like hiring someone. And so I was fortunate to have worked with, you know, some an engineer in India who in a previous startup and he was looking for some like side work. And we already had a developed relationship and he really helped accelerate development whilst I couldn't, right? And I didn't, to avoid me burning houses especially as well. And so really, really early on, I did do that, but it was kind of part time development.
Elston:And then I think it was only maybe a year or like maybe two years in, I basically hired a full time kind of developer. But again, people think it's a lot more expensive than it really is. And I think if you can find the right interview process, there are loads of people across the world, there's advantage of running a remote company, right? Who will really, really determined and interested in just getting experience and building things. They're just lost, because they're not in Silicon Valley, not in London, they're not in Berlin or the hotspots or Lisbon or wherever.
Elston:And it's very difficult for them to be found. But if you kind of look on some of these platforms and not the big ones like Upwork and the mainstream ones, you can find some really driven quality people who who are very happy and interested to work with you. And and that's it's a really good match, especially in the other days because you don't need that 10 x engineer or that 200 k SF kind of engineer to make things happen. You just need some more hands, right, to to help you. With AI, it's changing.
Elston:I didn't have AI back in the day. And so, there's two ways about it. Now hopefully maybe you can create more with AI yourself or you can, you know, have a junior engineer help you out with AI and turns them into more of a medium senior engineer. So there's there's a lot of options out there.
Charlie:I think a lot of people, not us, but some people are catching up to the fact that it's just great talent all over the place now who are able to do this just for less than an SF engineer and that kind of thing, and it just makes sense to work with them. Something else I wanted to ask you, something we talk about this podcast a lot is about the kind of ramen profitable goal you had. So you were living in London a lot of the time you were building this, and you still do to some extent, but you're in Lisbon a lot now and traveling. What was the threshold you had in mind? Where you're like, I'm going to quit my job basically.
Charlie:And was it like a a specific number or was it some other metric or how did you go thinking about that?
Elston:Yeah. I mean, it wasn't entirely down to a number. It's just down to also just personal, life things that I needed to kind of align. I wasn't going to do it before like, I don't know, around six k, I think six seven k MRR. And it sounds a lot, but honestly like yeah with taxes and everything especially if you live in London like it's a lot less than people think.
Elston:I think I eventually end up doing it towards the end of I think it's $20.22 and that was around 8 k MRR. And that was just a convenient time with that plus, like, personal things. And it made sense just to go out and focus on it full time.
Charlie:I love to talk about the sort of how you approach products and research at TinyHost these days, because it's a kind of products where you have people who are hosting all sorts of different types of files, file types for different reasons, a different scale as a student, a individual, an organization. Like, you could create dozens and dozens of different personas for this. How do you kind of take that complexity, and do you have some kind of mental model for how you approach this, how you prioritize it, maybe how you try and simplify this and build for the right people?
Elston:Yeah. It's it's one of our greatest strengths and also the biggest weaknesses that we have. Because I think when you're trying to market a product, the the typical playbook is find your like ideal customer and just focus on that. Find out, you know, where they are, you know, who they talk to, what they read and just be all over those kind of platforms. Right?
Elston:But with us, honestly, we have like 10 different personas if that if 10 different popular personas, there's also these fringe and edge cases as well. And I think for us, I've always tried to follow the core product strategy if we wanna be the simplest place to host anything, right? And at the bottom of the day, at the end of the day, you know, we are a hosting platform. And so we will host anything for you. Right?
Elston:And so features that we release, we have to keep in mind, does it apply and is it applicable to, you know, everyone? Like if a developer says, is this feature, we really want this feature. Can we roll it out in a way that it doesn't affect people uploading their CV or a restaurant menu? And only then will we figure out how to do it. And we've said no to things because they've been too nation specific.
Elston:Right? And I think it's something that we're on we're continuously trying to, you know, figure out how do we do it. We're now looking into more personalization, which is super cool with LLMs. So we're trying to, you know, categorize, for example, who you are, what you upload, like, and basically run you through an onboarding process dedicated to as if you were from a restaurant hospitality background versus developer profile. I think that's gonna be interesting as well.
Elston:But yeah, I think all of our product decisions have always had to be general enough to be applicable to every different use case, but also not overcomplicate the product because that's that's something else that's super important. Like if you look at our homepage and the core reason why we're successful is because we're simple. But the underlying tech is actually very much general. It's just delay as we've put on top of it. Right?
Elston:And so it's probably more so the marketing funnels that bring us a different customers. But underlying, we are a static hosting platform now. But that means people who wanna upload a CV can use us, people who wanna upload their AI app can use us, people that want to, you know, upload a menu is there. So there's a lot of different use cases. If we follow kind of the jobs to be done framework, a lot of it's also, you know, led by SEO.
Elston:We see opportunities in certain file types again, and so PDF was a big thing. And now we became, you know, one of the largest PDF hosts in the world and things like that. So there's a lot of different experimentations and, yeah, product vision.
Charlie:I wanna dig a bit deeper into the fact that you are categorizing all your users with LLMs based on the things they upload, because that's kind of a crazy idea. I mean, it's not that crazy, but I just haven't heard anyone do that before and it makes sense. So have you started that process yet? Is or is this something that's going live soon?
Elston:We haven't released it yet. We've back tested it on like the most popular customers we've have. And basically what we wanted to do is figure out how do we figure out a list of use cases. Right? And so I think maybe that 10 to 15 kind of use cases and then fit everybody in that kind of in so we're gonna get it wrong here and there, but a lot of times we'll get it right.
Elston:And so we've done a lot of work training kind of like basically engineering to prompt to get it right, a little trial and error. So it's been going on for a while and we're just about actually to to run the to release the first iteration of it. I'm gonna get some data in. And the hope is, I think it's going to increase conversion. So one of the biggest issues we have is we have tons of traffic coming through, but we don't convert them well enough.
Elston:And this hopefully should help with conversion. And I think that's something super cool and interesting with AI that people don't really talk about as much as it enables people to offer personalized experiences for the first time, right? And so you can create a personal app, a workflow app, right? That just for you, right? Personalized diary, a personalized, you know, habit tracker.
Elston:You don't need to use one of the, general ones and then set it up. And so that's gonna completely change the landscape of things, right? So the general SaaS, I don't think is gonna exist as much as it used to be because people can effectively create their own SaaS. And that is really what we're kind of like focused on. I think everybody likes personalization.
Elston:Right? Everybody likes an app for them, not just everybody. Like, you're an estate agent, you want the tool for estate agents or the CRM for estate agents. It's better than, you know, Salesforce in some eyes. And so that I think is is super interesting, and I'm excited to see what what other products, you know, use that and now what we we do with it as well.
Charlie:I definitely understand being able to personalize the product for them once they're already in the funnel of being a user and having uploaded something. But how do you how do you personalize the landing page or the experience for them before they've actually signed up or anything like that? Do you do that based on, say, the traffic source or something?
Elston:No. We don't do that at the moment. So that's probably like a really good next kind of step. But effectively, we know that people come through certain landing pages. So we do very basic stuff.
Elston:For example, if you come through from our like, you know, resume hosting landing page, when you hit our homepage, the h one changes from the simplest way to share your work to the simplest way to share your resume. And so just little things like that are, like, super cool for, funnel conversions and optimizations. And that's literally just a very basic, like, query prompt in the URL. Right? And so stuff like that we do, but we don't use LLM and thing for that.
Elston:And there's probably some interesting things that are more complex you can do of that, but not yet.
Charlie:I know you as someone who generally cares a lot about you because your background, not just as a developer, but also as a designer. So you think a lot about who the user is, what the user wants. You talk about jobs to be done. But what does your typical research process look like? Like, tools do you use?
Charlie:Like, what approaches do you do? Do you use surveys? Do you use do you interview people? What's your kind of general purpose, like, to doing to doing research?
Elston:There's a lot of different tools that we have right now in play. We have Microsoft Clarity, which is just effectively Hotjar and live recordings, which are very, very useful. We have Posthoc, which is really cool for, you know, funnels. We have user interface. So we have this cool pop up that shows up, you know, after you log in multiple times saying, do you wanna book a call with us or we wanna speak to you?
Elston:And so we have actual, you know, user interviews. I think you said it yourself, like you should be speaking to at least one user a week. Right? And that's kind of our goal. Like we need to you need to be doing that.
Elston:And then we look at things that people are searching for. Right? And so we, HRFs is a big kind of indication of like trends and, you know, demands and what people are looking at. And so we're constantly monitoring that, like some of it, and now like there's a lot of AI keywords coming through and about, which are very low difficulty right to rank for. And so some really cool, interesting ideas that, you know, we can build around that.
Charlie:And are these the kind of things that cause our constant source of creativity for content ideas? So you mentioned a few things there. So you obviously speak to your users, you look at, like, Ahrefs, like keyword traffic and that kind of thing. Are there any other kind of sources for new content ideas that come out or were those the main ones, would you say?
Elston:Those are the main ones, but I think we also get a lot I get a lot from just still doing customer support. Right? And so we have we a customer support is difficult, but we don't get as much as you think for the volume of users that we have. Like we have I think in our user base right now, we have in a in a database, we have, over 800,000 users basically signed up. And we're a small team, but just being in those kind of channels, I can see, you know, what people are having difficulty with, what people would really appreciate.
Elston:You know, people come saying, hey, guys, can you do this? And we say no, but we can in the future. And then we build it out. Then we build a video on it and we follow like the typical content playbook, right, where maybe you put out a tweet and so Twitter's big, you put out a tweet, you see how that does. If it does well, you make it into a blog and then it ranks.
Elston:And after that you make into a video and then you take the video and turn it into shorts and you write it on TikTok and YouTube shorts. And that one like tweet is now like 25 or 30 different pieces of content. Right? That are all bringing in traffic for that, just for that like use case.
Charlie:And in terms of your team that makes product decisions at TinyHost at the moment, am I right in saying it's mostly between you and, Kurosh at the moment?
Elston:Yeah. It's it's still pretty small and agile, I think. I'm a big believer in just keeping that, like, tight. And so it is just, you know, us to kind of thinking it. But we obviously get feedback from the engineering team.
Elston:We we try to encourage support to to give us insights and stuff. But, yeah, in terms of strategy, we're still I'm still yeah. It's still very kind of small and focused.
Charlie:So as far as you can share internal debates, are there any kind of common debates or interesting questions you have within the product team at TinyHost at the moment?
Elston:AI, for example, is is is an obvious one. We've we've stayed away from it for a while, basically, mainly because we didn't just wanna tack something on. And our product doesn't naturally, you know, play out for AI in some ways, but people have used us for AI hosting, hosting an app they build with AI, for example. And so, yeah, we're kind of exploring like, you know, how do we actually start, you know, embedding AI a bit more into our platform. Right?
Elston:And so there are talks about us going down the website builder route, which we stayed away from a for a while, mainly because of the the cost and the the investment needed to build a website builder, and there's a lot of them out there. But honestly, I don't think there's one out there that is as simple and easy to use as it should be. And that's our bread and butter and our core philosophy, right, is is simplicity and ease of use. And now the technology is around to allow, you know, it should be for anyone to build a website. And I don't think anyone's come up with a product that's easy enough to use.
Elston:So exploring that. And yeah, we are like effectively a last mile solution in a long process workflow. Right? And so, like, if you look at, for example, someone designing a a brochure, you open maybe InDesign, you go through what kind of software that helps you review, use emails to send them about. And then we are the last kind of step in hosting it.
Elston:But what if we move a little bit further up the chain? Right? What if we allowed you to create some of these or create have templates where you can just go and fill things in? Right? Make the platform more useful, which is there.
Elston:Another interesting one is spaces we're calling it. So it's a way that people can host things they wanna they're proud of, right? And so there are places you can put stuff online like GitHub pages or like Dropbox and that kind of stuff. But there's no place where you just host like the things you're really proud of and you wanna stay in there and you can easily just share with people, like your portfolio effectively. Right?
Elston:It could be apps you've made. It could be a PDF of, like, your design work. Right? And it's really easy to use. You have analytics on it.
Elston:You can track it and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of people use this for those use cases as well. And so we're trying to figure out how do we make it more easy easier for that use case. Will it help, you know, reduce churn, get people more sticky on it? So there's a lot of interesting discussions around that.
Charlie:So you saw a lot of people complaining about Dribbble, and you thought it's there for the taking. Is that right?
Elston:Yeah. Yeah. Effectively. I think I think there is just, yeah, a lot of I'm I'm honestly amazed, like how many people still upload their design portfolios on us. Right?
Elston:And it's because they have a PDF, for example. Right? And I think they want to have more customization and have their own custom domain. It's a bit more professional, right? And when you have something like that.
Elston:And there's there's some depth in that. And that's that's literally what we've always done really well, it's just kind find these weird, like edge cases and niches, then just crack it open and realize that a lot of more people want that, but they didn't know this existed before. But now we've enabled it to them. You know, they they they're like, this is cool. Let me let me let me make this happen.
Elston:Like people didn't know you can put a PDF online under a custom domain. And so many people now are buying custom domain through us because you can do that and literally just uploading a PDF. Like, I don't think anyone ever really offered that before. Right? Your PDF would be a Google Drive link or it would be Dropbox link or something like that.
Elston:Or you take that PDF and turn it into a proper website, but then put it on a website hosting platform. But you can literally just take a PDF that you've designed and then put it online under a custom domain. And that's now a website for somebody to access. So stuff like that is super cool. And we've just kind of kept on kept on building upon those those things.
Charlie:It's kind of mad how much money there seems to be made around helping people, like, host, manipulate, upload, edit PDFs. PDFs. Like, to this day, it's just something that's super popular. Yeah. Like, chat with PDF kind of AI rappers were a bit of a joke, but people seem to be doing awfully well for them.
Elston:They're still there. I mean, I know, like, ilovepdf.com or whatever is, huge company effectively as well. It's weird. Like, my mom knows what a PDF is, and she's not technically, you know, savvy in any way, I'd say. But it's just that it's one of those words where I just throw in her eye.
Elston:Everyone knows what a PDF is. Like, Adobe have done really well to still maintain that file format. I don't know if anything else will change after that and something new will come along, like flash died for them. Hopefully, PDF stays. It's not a great format.
Elston:It's quite proprietary for a while, and that's why, like, Adobe did well with it, it was difficult to, like, do anything and tooling needed to be built around it. There are way better formats out there, but it's the dominant one, and it's everyone's using that. So it's I think we the Internet needs that, but, yeah, let's see how long it lasts.
Charlie:So when you've gone from being a solopreneur, you've been through many different phases with TinyHost from when you had a full time job where you were a solo founder, starting to scale it a bit, get a few more team members on board, being full time, have a whole team, 400 k ARR. What's the main transition from, like, in the early days to now? Like, what is it like going through that that transition for you?
Elston:For me, I think I found it quite generally comfortable. Like, I know a lot of people don't like this because of management and they don't wanna deal with people. And, I enjoy working with a team and I think you get a lot from it. But the hardest thing is just trying to take yourself away from the core of the product, right? And so instill what's in your head into the team, And you have everyone on the same page about what are our leading principles?
Elston:Like, if there's a decision, what are the factors that we usually need to consider? How do we make a decision that aligns with the strategy? And when it's just you and you can there's the speed obviously element of it, you can just make decision quicker, but how do you get that knowledge into a team of people, right? I think that's been the hardest thing, but there's been amazing benefits for me because also you have tunnel vision, After working a product for so long and you need fresh eyes, fresh energy that just gives you new perspective on things. And there's things where we've implemented.
Elston:I would never have implemented because I would never have seen that. And because people in our team have recommended on analysis and things, and that's been super interesting. So you can move, you know, what's the famous quote, if you want to go
Charlie:Fast, go alone. Yeah,
Elston:if you wanna go fast, go alone, but if you wanna go far, go together. And I think that's it. At the beginning, you need to go fast basically. But at some point, like, and this is why I think like, you know, indie hackers and, you know, companies end up plateauing is because they don't want to, you know, build a team around it. And that's one of the reasons, it's not the only reason, but I think there's a lot you can get.
Elston:And there's a reason some of the biggest companies out there are not one man companies, right? They can be small for sure. They don't need to be 100, 200 person companies, but they are not one man companies or even two man companies. You can't do everything yourself. And if you really want to keep on growing and taking it further, we do a lot of things now as well.
Elston:The technology is just, it still looks simple, but there's a lot of different things that we touch, right? From custom domains to buying custom domains, to PDF hosting, to, you know, we added like 80 different file formats now, right? And so there's a lot of code there and we need more hands to make this work. And so, yeah, it's definitely been a huge benefit and I will continue working and building on a team. And it also removes the pressure from me as a founder, right?
Elston:As a solopreneur, especially with a company like this size, like you never feel like you can just take a break sometimes, take the foot off the gas and you need that to refresh and continue working, right? Whereas now we have like a support team and things, when things go wrong, there are processes and escalations and things. And it means that I'm not always on call or anything can be sorted without me. And that is important for you, just your sanity and your health, right? So it's super cool.
Elston:I'm just, yeah, proud to be able to like ship bigger and and better things that I wouldn't have been able to do myself and make it a more dominant player in the field.
Charlie:It sounds like you're kind of happy and excited to be in the position you are from where you started, and some people feel a bit crestfallen perhaps sometimes because they expected it to be the answer to all their problems or something. It's not quite what they expect. What's been like for you? Am I right in saying you're actually just like happy and grateful to have have got there?
Elston:I am I'm 100% like happy, grateful for this life, for the flexibility, for the people, the community I've met. Like that's been super interesting just having, you know, ramen club, indie beers and everybody like it's been, it's been an amazing journey, but there are downsides as well. Right? So like, like I remember people in the early days, people kind of saying like, you just got to grow this company to a certain stage and you just hire someone to solve those problems. That doesn't exist.
Elston:You can't just pay someone to magically solve your problems. Like it's the whole founder mode versus director mode or whatever you want to call it. You are still going to be at the helm of the company, right? And you are going to be effectively, they say most good companies are run through dictatorships effectively, right? And so you still need to be there to direct the company, you know, have, you know, the force out from strategy and you are still a core part of the company.
Elston:You can't really easily just replace yourself. I think there is obviously a future place where you can hire a CEO and that kind of stuff. But then you can't it's really hard to find someone I think with the same drive and energy and ambition and probably vision as you because it's it's what makes companies effectively unicorns, And that's why they call them very difficult things to to make. Maybe a part of me definitely aligned with thinking, know, I'll build this and then effectively, you know, I won't have to, you know, work as much. And I have especially when I quit my job and when full time and I said, okay, look, I'm just gonna, you know, have so much all the spare time I was working on tiny.
Elston:I now have to myself to go and work on other things and hobbies and stuff like I neglected for a while. But what actually ended up happening is just filled that with like more tiny work sometimes. And you're just working, you know, because you're trying to grow the company. So it's not like I've got like way more like spare time, but I do get the benefits of being able to, you know, flexibly travel and work remotely and that kind of stuff. But there are lots of downsides and I am working definitely harder than my nine to five.
Elston:But it's also because, you know, I enjoy that. Right. And I'm fortunate to have built in, found it and grown it to a certain level that supports me and the team. And I'm also very fortunate to have built an idea which has a lot of depth, right? And so there's other products within, you know, our group that we know that they've grown it and they've plateaued for a combination of reasons.
Elston:Like it's it's based on a platform. There's only so much, you know, growth potential it has, and they've kind of then had to start another idea. They wanna continue to earn more revenue. But none of these decisions I I thought of when I came up with the idea, right? Hindsight, like it was a valid space with a very deep growth potential.
Elston:And if I started another company, I definitely think about that. But, I think it's generally been been amazing, and I'm really grateful for everything.
Charlie:And what do you think about the current state of bootstrapping and indie hacking?
Elston:Yeah. It's it's changed a lot since, I think, our days when we we started it. Now I feel like indie hacking to me, like I stumble upon it. I'm from indiehackers.com. Right?
Elston:And there's a great resource in place. I think people have moved off Twitter onto Twitter now from that. But it feels to be very much like a place where people are just converging on building variations of the same thing. So everyone like, you know, sees TallyForm go up and then it there's hundreds of new form builders coming up or like it's AI wrappers and this kind of stuff. And I think indie hacking for me was super cool because people solve like very good use cases that companies would never have built.
Elston:Right? Mainly because it made no sense for a company to put all this effort in for an extra 10 k a month. But for an individual, like 10 k a month is is a lot is enough. Right? To to live off.
Elston:Like, they're already in those interesting, like, indie project that's sort of it's still around that basically helped people file their taxes every year. Right? And that was making, 20 k a month. But people seem to be just trying to copy each other's products and build the same versions. I had, someone DM me saying, hey, look, I'm building like a GDP friendly privacy analytics.
Elston:And I was like, okay, great. How do you differ from simple analytics, plausible, and fathom for example? He said, I'm just gonna be cheaper. I mean, that's a interesting strategy. It's not it's not necessarily the one I would go for.
Elston:And so I think I would like to see more variations in that space. And I I know I contradict myself with by saying like pick a valid industry, but there's a fine line between picking something validated and just copying it literally and just not, you know, adapting it in any kind of way. Right? And I think I want to see more indie hackers in that sense, find some really interesting use cases that no one's ever heard of, like has you have domain expertise in the construction field or in gardening or whatever like that. But I think people are already on Twitter now they see these MRR charts, they see all these people blow up and they're like, I'm just gonna build that because that's working, right?
Elston:And so it's a bubble, right? Whereas indie hackers, like the traditional indie hackers is an individual person which has amazing talent from like product to marketing and shipping and can go and just like solve one person's problem who you never ever really focus on because companies neglect them. That was what indie hacking and bootstrapping was amazing for me. And then it can turn into like something that people just live off, right? Which is super cool.
Elston:And they don't need to work out nine to five if they want to, they can have a flexible workaround then. So I hope we get back into that kind of space a bit more, but it's changed a lot. It's people start, are starting to compare it to like the drop shipping era and that kind of stuff. And it is getting easier and easier to build an app, right, with like Claude and Replit and Lovable, you can literally, you know, release something in a few hours. And so there's a lot of just, yeah, stuff, very similar stuff coming out.
Elston:So be interesting space to see how it develops.
Charlie:What do you think you would be working on if you started completely afresh today with the skills that you have?
Elston:It would definitely be something AI enabled because that's like the fastest like route to like five to 10 ks MRI, I think. And it depends, like, you saying that I would have the wisdom and the knowledge that I've had in the past or without that knowledge?
Charlie:I just don't mean starting from scratch. Like, you don't know how to code and you don't know how to design. So you, you know, you're still able to build, design and sell things basically.
Elston:Yeah. There's a few ideas that have come along my journey as well. Right? And that's the other interesting thing when you're working on ideas and products. Like, it may not be the best idea at at the moment.
Elston:Like, you may think it's a good idea, but you'll stumble upon something else. Like, know with you, for example, with Cozy, you have built it out and you found a massive like market in moderation. Right? And I said like, that's a very cool space to be in. So stuff like that is there.
Elston:And I think I've got a list of stuff that here and there will excite me. I think stuff in the content marketing space is really interesting. Like I basically talked about how you take a tweet turn into a blog post and a video. Like that stuff with AI now is like a lot easier and you can do amazing things with that. And as an indie hackers, a lot of workload, AI, again, you can simplify it and make it faster and better basically, right?
Elston:Stuff like that is really interesting. A fascination I had really young was trying to get something online and having a link that you can share and anyone can like just log in and see that. And that was super cool. And so it's a weird full circle moment that I'm now running a hosting company that makes it easy for people to do that. But like there's other interests I have like in music industry or in the film industry and stuff around that.
Elston:I think there's so much opportunity there that people don't like, you know, touch upon. But it would definitely be like something on a B2B space because I think as much as it's been amazing to run Tiny, it's a very, very complex business because of the volume of users that we have, right? Like you can make the same amount of money with a lot less users. And that's a lot, if you're definitely on the bootstrapping kind of phase and strategy, that's a lot better position to be than something in a company that has a lot of customers because it means, you know, less people to deal with. And so it would it would be something b to b, probably something AI enabled with a more defined, you know, ICP.
Elston:So it is not 10 personas. And I would use that kind of filter to kind of look at the ideas and things and and figure it out. So yeah. But it's it's definitely opened my whole the indie hacking world, the community, the journey has opened my eyes to, like, so many different opportunities.
Charlie:I would summarize your kind of general philosophy as you create things that there's clear evidence that people want, but you add your own, like, spin on it, like your own kind of twist. But you don't try and reinvent the wheel of everything, you pick like 20% of it that you're gonna put your own special spin on it, making it more accessible, making it more beautiful, making it cheaper, that kind of thing. Would you agree that that's generally Yeah. Agree. Much things.
Elston:And there's a lot of value to that. People may think like it's it's boring. It's unexciting. I want to build something huge. I mean, yeah, do that.
Elston:But maybe, you know, indie hacking is not your route. You need to go raise VC capital. But in another route is like you build something, you small, you get the resources, you get the financial independence of it and then you can go and build bigger things. And just because you build something small, just because you build a drag and drop web hosting tool doesn't mean you can't turn it into massive hosting company and then build AI tools and stuff like that, right? It's about a journey at the end of the day.
Elston:And I think I've learned as well, like the thing that I really like is simplifying complex technologies as it's again related to my character, my skillset, my product kind of knowledge is I really enjoy simplifying complex technologies and there's a lot of opportunities around that. And I think everyone needs to find it in themselves, what's their core strength or their interest, right? I know that you, you enjoy community and so you're building in the community space. And so that's my problem when people just blindly copy things because it doesn't lend into their stride, right? And so they're never gonna be amazing at it or succeed or go far because there are a lot of times where I'm just like, why am I building a thing that allows someone to upload PDFs, right?
Elston:Is it really worth it? I'm devoting years on my life to this, right? But it's a bigger mission, a bigger idea in my space in my head, right, that makes it worthwhile for me. And it keeps me going through it. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot of really cool, yeah, strategies that I've I've found that work me.
Charlie:Thanks, Elston. This has been a great interview. I've really enjoyed it, and I think it's gonna be super valuable for everyone listening in. So, yeah, thank you for joining us, and I'll see you at Indy Beers in London tomorrow.
Elston:100%. Looking forward. Thanks a lot, Charlie.
Charlie:Thank you.