#280 – Replacing Yourself as CEO, Living on a Boat, and Crowdfunding to Survive with Alex MacCaw of Reflect

We are here with Alex McCaw, the founder of reflect.app. How's it going? Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. This This is your second time on the Indie Hackers podcast. I can't remember how long ago it was that you were on the first time. Was it at least three or four years ago? Do you remember? It was at least three or four years ago. I can't even remember what I was talking about. I think let me look it up. I think you were definitely still doing Clearbit, but now you have, like, pivoted. You're episode number 15. I found Damn. You came on in 2017. Like, you were one of the original, interviewees. We were looking up Clearbit because I was like, okay. Alex has, like, moved on. You started this company Clearbit. I think you raised funding for it. It was huge. When I was in SF, like, every company was using Clearbit to, like, look up data. Like, if I wanted to find somebody's email address, I would use Clearbit. And now I looked it up, and it's, like, this huge, like, enterprise y company. Like, you go to the website, and it says, like try to figure out, like, what it does. And at the top, there's just a drop down that says, like, solutions. And you know if a company says solutions at the top, like, it's an enterprise company that's got, like, you know, a thousand customers and is making bank. And then we looked it up on some other website and it's making, like, tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue. I think it was, like, 40 something million. And you're not even doing that anymore. You're like, that's cool. I started that. Good enough. I'm on to the next thing. And now you're an indie hacker with a bootstrap business called Reflect. That's a crazy transition. Yeah. That's right. You say I pivoted. Well, I almost pivoted my life. Like, I, you know, I was CEO of a, you know, a b to b SaaS business, that was, you know, almost 200 people, and I wasn't doing any coding or building myself. And now I run a consumer app. There's four of us. We have just over 2,000 customers, and I am doing everything myself, design, development, etcetera. And it is like a complete complete change in my life. By the way, I was gonna say that reflect the landing page is so sick. It's, like, highly unique. It's like this dark purple futuristic looking landing page. I was gonna say, does Alex code? Like like, you know, are you are you, you know, involved in this? I do code. Every day, I'm coding. And and I I mean, that was one of the criteria for this new business. You know, after my years of running a b to b SaaS business, I I had to code. I had to get back to coding. So …