These digital nomads bootstrapped three SaaS startups to over $7.5k/mo while exploring the globe

In 2016, Danielle Johnson and James Ivings left their office jobs behind to backpack for a year.

They’ve built successful email and AI startups from buses and boats—and after eight years on the road, they’re still shipping as they travel.

Here’s their epic journey so far👇.

An urge to travel

James: I got bad grades at school and went to university on a whim. I picked computer science at random but ended up kind of finding my tribe.

A job at the UK government was my first taste of office life. After a few years, I wanted to kill myself. So, I started working for a startup with a group of friends from work.

Danielle: I got a placement job at the government as part of my computer science degree. That’s where James and I met.

After a couple of years of working, we both decided to quit our jobs and go backpacking. That was about 8 years ago.

We did client work while we traveled, and we also started working on our first product. It was a tool called ReleasePage that showed users their Github release notes.

We launched it after a year and it go no traction at all. We made about $600 total.

I guess it was indie hacking, but it didn’t really feel like it. It was just the two of us and we had no clue what we were doing.

Building an MVP on a bus

Danielle: Leave Me Alone is a service to unsubscribe from emails and get inbox zen. We launched the first version in January 2019 after cobbling together a prototype on this really long bus journey in South America.

James: It was very simple (see above). You’d see a list of your subscriptions with a button next to them to unsubscribe. I shared it with a group of 20 or 30 other indie hackers called Maker’s Kitchen which was super helpful.

We spent a couple more weeks building and then shipped it. It was our first launch to get any traction.

In search of recurring revenue

James: Our first pricing model was based on how far back through your emails you wanted to search. The further you looked, the more server time it cost.

People didn't understand it, so we tried selling credits for like 200 unsubscribes instead.

Danielle: Ultimately, we wanted a monthly recurring revenue model. So we decided to improve on a rollup concept from a competitor, Unroll Me. We grab mail you want to read, put it into collections and deliver it whenever you want. Once a week maybe.

Around the same time, we introduced a mail screening function called Shield. It also holds mail that’s not from a priority contact and releases it at a time you prefer.

We offer a seven-day pass to get people to try these subscriber features as part of an inbox clear-out.

James: Before that, we made a couple of hundred dollars a month. Then our revenue started doubling till around April 2023.

Organic marketing

James: We've done social media marketing. We've done content marketing. Web posts, SEO targeting. Most things we’ve tried have had no impact at all.

The most effective pieces of marketing we've had have all been organic. People randomly tweeting about us. A big influencer or making an Instagram post. 

Anytime we try to replicate that, it hasn't worked at all.

We recently implemented the SetApp API to get the app in front of a new audience. It’s a suite of Mac and OS products users can access through a single subscription.

It’s too early to say how much it will help us grow. But it seems like a good mechanism.

Shipping while sailing

James: We’ve launched two products since Leave Me Alone, both after moving to a small sailboat called Nayru.

We bought the boat thinking it would be a two-year extended holiday where we didn’t really work. 

Danielle: It’s hard enough getting work done while traveling on land. Try doing it when your office is rocking about!

But we still ended up building new products.

We launched an AI email writing extension called Ellie in 2022, after leaving the boat for the winter. James put a basic version together while were in Thailand for two weeks with friends.

James: I’d just started getting cold emails that were clearly written by AI. I thought, if people are going to do this to me, then I'll reply to them with AI.

Danielle: We shipped it on Product Hunt and it was so basic. I made the website with vanilla JavaScript and HTML.

Despite this, the launch itself was stressful. We had to wait for approvals to update the product when it broke, and we got a huge response to a James’s tweets about Ellie.

He offered early access for people who commented — and about 400 people did. I had to log into his Twitter and reply because he was basically having a breakdown. 

James: We’ve made some improvements since we launched, but it’s largely the same. It’s making us about $1,500 a month with very low churn.

18 months at sea

Danielle: Later that year, we traveled from Europe to the Caribbean on our boat. Because of the time of year we crossed the Atlantic, we ended up living on Nayru for 18 months straight. Everything was harder, work-wise and life-wise.

James: It can take two hours to get ready to just go and sit in a café. We could do it in the Mediterranean where there’s more sailing infrastructure and there’s all these little cute little coastal towns.

In the Caribbean, you’re much more off-grid. We didn't vibe with that so much. We found ourselves working in the boat most of the time.

But we managed to find time to code. About four months ago, we launched an AI SaaS boilerplate called StartKit.

Escaping a hurricane

Danielle: It’s been hard to work on it since we launched. We had to run away from Hurricane Beryl in June, then we took the boat out of the water and prepped it for selling.

Now we're just traveling around Europe, so we can do bunch more work on StartKit. We know there’s a lot of potential there.

You can create images, you transcribe audio and chat. And it’s saving the history, embedding files. All the AI stuff that you spend ages writing with any provider is all done. It's literally an entire app already built with every AI module.

Be realistic about success

Danielle: We love work, but it’s never been the priority for us. We always say ‘yes’ to life things — hiking, diving, socializing. That’s why we’re doing this stuff.

Indie hacking is a dream for us because it gives us the lifestyle we want. And we don’t have to work that hard.

James: Most people won’t ever make that much money indie hacking. Enough to travel, maybe. But not stay in ridiculous hotels all over the world.

Social media is really bad at giving you FOMO. But it's all just survivorship bias.

If anyone tells you there's a shortcut to success, they're not telling you the truth. They're selling something.

At the same time, hard work every day, shipping as many things as you can doesn't guarantee success either. Plenty of people never make any serious money grinding.

Try and do a little bit of work every day to keep your mind active. But take regular breaks for your mental health.

Danielle: And if you've tried for a few years and you decide you need to get a job or do some freelance work, that's not a failure.

Parting advice

James: As far as indie hacking goes, the shorter amount of time you can spend prototyping an MVP, the better. You don't know what people want yet.

Danielle: But that doesn’t mean it should be bad. Move fast and break things doesn't mean ship something that's literally broken.

Also, remember that indie hacking is never really passive income. If you do ever get to the point where a SaaS runs itself, you’ll probably just build something else anyway.

Then that’ll be on fire all the time instead.