#257 – From Indie Hacker to $200M+ with Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. We're here with Patrick Campbell, the founder of ProfitWell. Very popular, let's say, set of tools that helps other companies improve their revenue growth. So, if you've got a subscription company, ProfitWell will help you reduce the number of cancellations. It'll help you, figure out your pricing. It'll give you reports and stuff to just help you basically make money. And Patrick came on the podcast years ago. It's been a while, Patrick. And you shared the story behind ProfitWell. But then a few weeks ago, you emailed me with some, secret at the time, but now not so secret information that you have gone from being an indie hacker to being an indie hacker who sold his business for 9 figures. Not 7 figures, not 8 figures, but for over $200,000,000, I think, is the figure. Is that right? Yep. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Does that sound crazy to you? Because I like to like, when you say that out loud, do you even believe it? That's ridiculous. Oh, it's insane. And to give you guys context, we were, like, aggressively trying to pay off our house, like, very Dave Ramsey, if you ever heard of that guy. He's got some interesting views on, like, debt. I don't always agree with everything, but it was more like, oh, this is a really cool thing to bring my partner and I together. And so in January, we had $15,000 in a paid off house. That was it. Like, no stocks, no mutual funds, anything, and then, sold the company, and and it's very much not now. And it's it's kinda weird. Lot of champ like, lot of champagne problems now, like, existential crises. Like I was talking to a a founder who will go unnamed, but he has a company that is worth many millions of dollars. And I was talking to him on the podcast recently, and he is kinda broke. And And there's this really interesting thing where you can have this company that's super successful, but you haven't had an exit of it. Right? You haven't actually sold it like you have, and you're just stressed. And, from the outside looking in, everyone's like, oh, your company's making tens of millions of dollars. You must be rich. And it's like, no. Totally. Actually, I'm broke. No. I'm paying my employees. I'm paying my bills. It's kinda crazy. Well, that's that's something that's I'm really curious about. So how does a bootstrapped founder grow a company that that big? Yeah. Probably every indie hacker wants to wants to be where you are. Like, oh, I sold my company for 8 figures. I think I talked about it on the pod a …