Mac Martine shares how he ideated, bootstrapped, and white-labeled his way to $58k MRR

Mac Martine bootstrapped his business to $58k/mo and a life-changing exit in 2.5 years. I caught up with him to see how he did it.

Turns out white-labeling is a bigger opportunity for indie hackers than I thought.

The "right" way to ideate a B2B business

James: You built products for a few years but none of them went anywhere until this one. What did you do differently this time around?

Mac: I started out by reaching out to anyone I knew who either ran a business, or an agency, or had a fairly high-level job. Industry didn’t matter much at this point. I was putting out wide nets.

So I made a list of people that I knew and started reaching out - maybe five at a time. I just wanted to start having conversations and see where it led me. I’d email them and ask if they’d meet me for coffee and I would just start picking their brains.

How to approach discovery conversations

James: How did you approach these conversations?

Mac: I was wanting to know about their business, their processes, their pains. I wanted to know what their challenges were so I would just sit there and ask them a lot of questions. Things like:

• What does a typical day for you look like?
• What tasks do you do that are really time-consuming?
• What task do you do that you hate doing or dread doing?
• What task do you outsource or feel like you could outsource?
• What software do you currently use? How does that work out for you?

And on and on like this.

Then my final questions were:

• What did I miss? Is there anything I should have asked but didn’t?
• Are there any specific software tools you are looking for, or things that might streamline your business?

The majority didn't have answers to this question, or thought that their processes were as smooth as they could be, or at least that there was no room for improvement.

James: That'd make things harder.

Mac: Yeah, the process required a lot of deep listening, asking a lot of questions and just getting them to talk as much as possible. A lot of “tell me more about that.”

James: Tell me more about that.

Mac: 😑

James: 😎

Mac: It was up to me to figure out how to filter and interpret their true pains.

After these meetings, I would go home, make notes, look for patterns, and figure out my next steps, which usually involved some tinkering and more conversations.

James: Did these conversations exhaust your network?

Mac: No, at the end of the meeting, I usually asked them if they knew anyone I should talk to or who might be interested in talking to me. This would usually lead to a few more conversations.

Discovery interviews as an introvert

James: More importantly, did they exhaust you?

Mac: As an introvert, these meetings were a bit hard for me at first, but what I quickly realized was that while I would often dread going to the meetings, I had a great time once I got there. I really enjoyed meeting so many new people and learning so much. It was like a masterclass in sales processes.

These meetings were obviously crucial for me to land on a valuable idea. But they were also very valuable to me as a person because they got me out of my comfort zone, and forced me to have conversations with lots of strangers - not something I was very good at doing prior to that. I definitely came out the other side a stronger conversationalist.

Finding the right idea

James: Tell me about how you knew you had landed the right idea.

Mac: I don't think you can truly know that you've found the right idea until people start pulling out their credit cards.

But in this particular case, I had been going to all these meetings and honing in on sales teams and then lead generation tools and I definitely felt like lead generation was where I should be focused. There’s a lot of value there and people were definitely willing to pay for good tools around lead generation.

James: Was there an "aha" moment?

Mac: In one particular conversation, I remember we were outside at a coffee shop and I was doing my normal routine of asking a bunch of questions, showing them what I had been thinking about and working on.

In the end, we had defined a tool that he followed up with by saying “if you had that right now I would hand you my card and have you swipe it for $800”. And that was enough for me to go off and make it happen and see if he would stick to his promise. And while he didn't pay $800, he did pay… and so did a bunch of other people.

Creating an itch to scratch

James: People always advocate scratching your own itch. You've got sales tool but you're not a salesperson by trade.

Mac: Up to here, my side projects were often trying to scratch my own itch. This works for some people like Nathan Barry - but never really worked out for me.

A lot of my scratch-your-own-itch ideas had massive marketplace-type problem where I needed a lot of people at once to make it valuable. And as a solo bootstrapped founder, that's incredibly difficult to do. Unless you maybe have a huge audience already. And even still, it's very difficult.

In hindsight I probably should have paid more attention to itches I had in the websites and apps I was making for fun - there were certainly plenty of improvements to be had in those workflows, especially back then.

James: So you went looking for an itch instead.

Mac: Yeah. But while the product I built didn’t scratch an existing itch, it very much scratched the itch I had of needing to generate leads for my product. What I was building was a lead generation tool, and there's no better way to generate leads for your business than with your own product.

I attribute 98% of the growth of that business to leads generated through using the tool itself. It’s a bit meta.

James: Was that a stroke of luck or brilliance?

Mac: That was completely unintentional. I didn't have much of an agenda when I was in the ideation phase other than to find something that people would find valuable.

Eat your own dog food

James: And then you ate your own dog food.

Mac: Yeah, it had multiple benefits. One is that I was a user of the tool and so I knew what it should do, and I could see where the gaps were and what was and wasn't important to have.

And also I had a tool that I could use for free to generate leads, and it actually worked. So I spent zero dollars on marketing or advertising because I didn't need to.

How to decide on features

James: How did you decide what features to include?

Mac: I definitely did not get into the feature race. Once I had a good working tool doing what it was intended to do, it would take a lot for me to add new features. The reality is people throw out feature ideas left and right, but it's a small percentage of those that will actually be used and move the needle, and so I was trying to be very cognizant of that, and I think that paid off.

Ignore your competitors

James: Did you look over the fence a lot to figure out the exact right features?

Mac: This will be an unpopular opinion, but you can do really well ignoring all competition. It guarantees a unique position.

James: How so?

Mac: If you are talking to people about solving pain points and you can tell that they really want these pains relieved, then I believe that's enough to know there's room in the market. And if you approach it this way you are guaranteed to have a unique positioning in the market because the chances of you doing everything just like a competitor are slim.

Seeing what your competitors are doing can often make you think that that's what you should be doing too, which is definitely not always the case. So in that sense, paying too much attention to your competitors can actually harm you if you aren't careful.

This is not to say that you should never pay attention to competition. Rather, that I don't believe that deep analysis of the competition is always as important as some say. Especially in the world of small SaaS businesses.

Getting the first customer

James: Ok, so you mentioned that someone wanted to pay. Tell me about the first time someone actually paid.

Mac: For one of these conversations, in May of 2018, I drove down to Eugene, Oregon, a couple hours from where I lived, went for a hike, and had a meeting with a fairly sizable software company.

They were looking for email addresses with very specific criteria. We defined this together, and I ended up selling them 10,000 email addresses. But then I had to go home and figure out how to get them.

It was fairly involved and complex, but I ultimately wrote scripts that scoured various sites and APIs and got what they asked for. They paid $4,400 without hesitation. And while it took me a little time to write these scripts, I could tell I was getting somewhere.

James: So this was a one-time service you provided in order to validate your unbuilt product and acquire a customer.

Mac: Yes and no. The idea behind selling those leads was indeed to go through the process to see if it could turn into a product. In the end, the tool I built was different, but both were in the lead generation niche, so I was clearly honing in on that.

How to grow post-validation

Sales DMs

James: How did you grow from there?

Mac:* Well, for about the first five or six months, I spent a lot of time on demo calls. I was using the tool to generate leads and approaching everyone I could find to get on a demo call. And the way I approached it, not having a sales background, and kind of cringing at the idea of doing “sales” calls, was that I would just ask people if they would be interested in letting me show them what I was working on and getting their feedback via LinkedIn DMs. And it worked really well.

Organic word-of-mouth

James: Sounds a lot like your discovery outreach — so you more-or-less kept doing what was already working. Anything else?

Mac: Eventually, people started talking about it in Facebook groups and forums and I’d get word-of-mouth traffic, so of course that helped too but pretty much anything beyond using the tool itself to fill the pipeline was organic.

White-labeling

James: Sounds effective, but what was the rocket fuel that blew you up?

Mac: At some point, five or six months in, one of my customers reached out and asked if I'd be interested in white-labeling the tool. At this point things were starting to go pretty well, I was probably somewhere around $8k MRR with negligible expenses.

James: So you went for it?

Mac: At first, I turned them down. Building a white-label is a lot of work and I didn't have time. Plus, what I was doing was working.

But as a few weeks went by, I was starting to feel maxed out having to do everything that a solo founder has to do - the sales calls, the demos, the development, and the million other things. And I thought, you know, maybe this white-labeling thing would be great.

If he's actually going to sell the tool and can interface with his customers, maybe that would take some stuff off my plate, and I would happily give a cut to someone who's generating customers. So I ended up doing that, and he did start generating customers.

James: Tell me a bit about the process of white-labeling. What did you have to do?

Mac: The resellers would have their own website that they hosted wherever they wanted.

The application itself was hosted in one place, and I was able to detect which domain the requests were coming from and display simple branding changes based on that. So each reseller would have their own logo and primary color, and that was about the only difference. The resellers also each had their own Stripe account.

By this time, I had a repeatable sales process, a repeatable script that I would use to reach out to people, a receptive target audience, and website messaging that converted. And so the resellers basically did the same and it worked out.

James: So they found customers and got a cut.

Mac: Yeah, before long I ended up having a total of 4 resellers, and in that way, I was able to grow the business without having to pay anyone out of my pocket because the resellers would get a cut of what they generated. And it in turn took a lot of sales off of my plate and a bit of customer support and that was pretty much it.

James: That's awesome. How did you get the other 3 resellers?

Mac: The first reseller reached out, then shortly after that, a friend of mine who was already using it for his clients chose to white-label it as well when he heard I was doing that for someone else.

A little while after that, there was another request to white-label it, and eventually a fourth tiny reseller came through them.

James: Did it dry up after four?

Mac: Over time, there were a number of other requests to be resellers, but I chose to turn them down because there was quite a bit of overlap in the markets each reseller was targeting. This created awkward situations at times when people would come across the same product with slightly different branding.

I would continue to entertain the conversations about new resellers, but I was requiring them to have clear targeting differentiation from the others. In the end I didn’t end up bringing on any other resellers.

It's slow until it isn't. Stick with it.

James: Anything else early-stage indie hackers should know?

Mac: It’s ironic that people take this path for freedom and having lots of time while sipping their cocktails on the beach, bathing in all their piles of money. Maybe you’ll get there, maybe you won’t. But if you do it won’t be easy, and there’s usually a price to pay to get there. And while life on the other side can be amazing, it definitely doesn't solve all your problems. So it's important to keep a holistic view of the effects it’s having on your life as you pursue this journey, and enjoy the process.

It can take a long time and a lot of tests before anything takes off. But things can also change incredibly fast. I see it all the time. People just grind away forever and all of a sudden, seemingly overnight, their charts are going up and to the right. That's basically what happened to me and it's not guaranteed to happen to everybody, but it can. It can change really fast.

James: Alright, where can people find you?

Mac: You can keep up with me on my personal site where I write about SaaS, bootstrapping, and nomading.

You can subscribe to The SaaS Bootstrapper newsletter here, and I’m @saasmakermac on Twitter.

I always encourage other creators to reply to one of my newsletters or DM me on Twitter and introduce themselves, that’s one of the main reasons I’m out here.

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