12 | Aaron Francis: Balancing Indie Life with Twins, Marketing to Developers, and Growing Your Twitter Audience

The Indie Dads Podcast

On this episode, Aaron Francis joins us to talk about way more topics than we could ever fit in one title. Aaron is a family man and father of twins, while also working full-time and building a startup on the side. He shares the lessons he's learned along the way, and how he balances everything without constantly burning out or negatively affecting his family life.
Aaron (https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis) is the co-founder of Hammerstone (https://hammerstone.dev), where he and his co-founders Colleen and Sean are building an interesting company with a business model you don't hear about as often: Selling a self-hosted package for an annual subscription.
Aaron talks about how and why he started Hammerstone, why he's not content to just work a 9-5 forever, how Hammerstone plans to market to fellow developers, how he grew his Twitter audience by 400% in one year, and a ton more.
Give it a listen and let us know who we should have on next!
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Mentioned in this episode:
Book: In Praise of Slowness: https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Slowness-Challenging-Cult-Speed-ebook/dp/B0024CF0CK/
Hammerstone: https://hammerstone.dev
The Dad Joke Database: https://dadabase.co by Nick Berry (https://twitter.com/nicholosberry) with thanks to Chris Lentz for pointing it out (https://twitter.com/ATLChris/status/1478889874291843072)
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Follow us on Twitter for more updates:
Bryan is @PocketBryan
Malcolm is @InquisitorJax
IndieDads is @IndieDads_
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About this podcast:
We're Bryan and Malcolm, a couple of dads sharing our journey about bootstrapping our indie businesses while still prioritizing our young families.

Our goal is financial and location independence, but not at the expense of our families, our kids' happiness, or our relationships.

That doesn't mean we won't work hard and hustle in order to get things off the ground, but our priorities will always be family-first.

We believe that you can bootstrap a successful SaaS, Freelance, or Indie business while still enjoying the family life. We're here to share our learnings as we build our businesses from scratch.