Smart Bear Live
A room of founders, a different crew for each episode, taking the time to dig into the details of a real, live business, being brutally honest with facts (and with love for people), being vulnerable (but with hope), explaining our approach, mindset, frameworks, and life experiences, so that listeners learn tactics but also strategic thinking, and the star of the show — the founder in the arena — makes progress. No ads, no affiliate links, no heavy editing, no follow-on courses or consulting. We're doing this for each other and for the love the game. It's a workshop, but also it's therapy. Beca...
E05 w/ Laura Roeder: Scared to commit to his best customers
Hasan Cagli tripled PostPlanify to $3K MRR the month he started selling to agencies instead of indie hackers. The agencies use it every day, ask for features, and stay. Everyone else signs up, pokes around, and churns. Which means the niche is already sitting in his own customer list. But winning there means giving up customer number seven -- the one he's actually worried about.
Cohost Laura Roeder built MeetEdgar in this exact category, scaled it past $5M ARR, and sold it. She and I dig into what it costs to stay vague -- including the years...
E04 w/ Dr. Sherry Walling: He built a great business, but it doesn't feel like it
Every founder faces this eventually. You spend every waking second just trying not to fail completely, so when it's actually working, you barely recognize it and don't know what to do with yourself. That's where Patrik Inzinger is. appointmed is calm and profitable at €2M ARR, ~1% churn, and a team of 8 that no longer needs him day to day. Which leaves: who am I, and what do I even want out of life?
Cohost Dr. Sherry Walling and I dig into that question — and discover it was never about a bigger revenue number. It's about being seen.
E03 w/ Craig Hewitt: Restarting growth after stuck at €16k/mo
Tiago Ferreira and João Amaro bootstrapped their AI podcast-repurposing tool Podsqueeze from zero to €16K/mo in less than a year, but then watched it sit flat for two years despite more features, better SEO, and free trials.
Cohost Craig Hewitt (Castos) and I dig into the real problem: the self-serve podcaster market is structurally brutal—most shows fade within months, so the product's value fades with them—and the real money is up-market, with agencies and media companies who barely churn.
A candid working session including:
- why "too expensive" is never the rea...
E02 w/ Rob Walling: $1M ARR, how to expand into a new market
DropInBlog's Jesse Schoberg has 2,000 happy customers, 2% monthly churn, a Bangkok-nomad life—and a growth curve that has plateaued. I and co-host Rob Walling tear into the real problem: a proven new cohort without a go-to-market plan. Two hours on pricing, positioning, AI/LLM visibility, the agency channel, ABM, and how to expand without breaking the business people already love.
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STARRING JESSE SCHOBERG
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DropInBlog
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WITH C...
E01: Restarting growth when stuck at $32K MRR
$32K MRR, 9% churn, flat growth, but we figured out a strategy for how to restart growth. The thought process behind the analysis and determining a strategy, not just knee-jerk answers.
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Dmytro runs a profitable screenshot-API SaaS: ~1,000 customers, $32K MRR, four years in — and dead flat. He wants to triple it to $100K MRR, so he did something almost no founder will do on camera: he opened his entire dashboard and let me poke at all of it.
(Dmytro's company is ScreenshotOne)
(Follo...
