24小时获数百万曝光与数百付费用户

Failures and successes

I've been building tools for creators for over five years. I studied CS in college, then tried to do restaurant startups. I failed. So, I sold everything and moved to Thailand and became a digital nomad for a few years. During that time, I became a full-time Twitch streamer, live coding eight hours a day. I built tools for Twitch streamers. That failed too. Then, I started building ThumbnailTest.com for YouTubers. The MrBeast team found me and I worked there for a bit, building tools for them. After I left Beast, I sold ThumbnailTest while it was at a 5-figure MRR. That was in early 2024, four months before YouTube released their competitor. Soon after that, Steven Bartlett from The Diary of a CEO reached out and said "Let's build something together." We messed around with ideas for a few months before we came up with Flightcast— video-first podcast hosting. We officially launched in October 2025. We use a flat SaaS subscription plus a small cut of ads. Already, revenue is higher than it ever was for ThumbnailTest.

Dead simple but awesome

I love building for creators. After years in the space, I know enough that I can finally tell when there's something missing. There are a lot of "tools for creators", but very few doing different things. Just lots of AI. I wanted to build a business that felt simple — explicitly not using AI at the core, but just in a feature or two. I chose video podcasting because it's a super annoying problem — big files, uploaded many times, analytics scattered across many platforms. It felt like a fun space to try to build something. If I do this right, Flightcast should feel dead simple but awesome.

Lots of iterations

It's built on NextJS, Cloudflare, Go backend for some media stuff, and OVH for servers. And we finally moved to Planetscale for the DB, thank God. Building it took a lot of iterations. It's surprisingly awkward to mix a lot of these APIs. And I had to redo the data architecture a bunch of times too. Letting people do five posts at once sounds great, but man it sucks to build. If I did it again, I'd limit v1.0 to just one awesome feature — likely analytics — and ship that before taking on the additional complexity of publishing, etc. And even if I kept an expanded feature set for v1.0, I would finish one at a time instead of building several things at once. Once that was done, we started bringing on beta users and building against feedback. The rule was - we can't launch until it's good enough for The Diary of a CEO.

Being a CEO

I'm CEO this time, which is really unusual for me. I can't just be an engineer anymore. It's harder to lock in when you can't just go into code for 12 hours. And I've had to learn to feel good about my work even when it isn't as tangible or straightforward. Then there's managing a team. We got seed funding for the first time in my life, so we brought in a couple of people smarter than me. I'm used to working by myself. I had no idea how to run a team or build a product from scratch with others. And it was especially difficult because I was the one with most of the context, but half of building is learning what works. Honestly, if I had to start over, I probably would have delayed bringing on a team until the foundation was done. I'm so proud I get to have this moment in my journey at all, but damn it's tough.

Prefilled distribution

After fighting distribution for a long time, I came to understand the creator world, and I realized that I needed a partner with the right audience and mindset. With this business, partnering with Steve essentially prefilled the distribution. So here's some advice: Partner with a creator. If you find the right one, it'll be the best decision you ever make. We had probably the largest launch of my entire life on LinkedIn + PR in podcast news outlets. The entire expanded Flight team posted on LinkedIn on the same day — their entire network is podcast people. We had millions of impressions and hundreds of paying customers by the end of it. It was a multi-year "overnight success" kind of day. Since then, growth has been pretty straightforward. Lots of podcasts recommending Flightcast to friends. And agencies adding more and more shows. But we have some upcoming big marketing strategies. I'll be on podcasts, we're launching an affiliate program, and we'll be giving podcasters discounts for putting Flightcast ads into their shows.

Talk to people more successful than you

What helped me most was talking to people who are a good bit more successful than me about very specific problems: people problems, hiring problems, mindset problems, running a tech team, etc. There's a lot written about everything to do with indie hacking, but less so when things get bigger. Or at least - the writing about it is more generic. It's harder to learn from. Getting coffee with a friend who runs a company 1-2 stages beyond mine has been a blessing again and again.

Care more than anyone else

Here's where to start: Find a bunch of people who make decent money, but not enough people pay attention to. Find what they're using right now. Replace one thing — make your entire first build just one amazing feature. I took ThumbnailTest straight out of TubeBuddy, and over many months made my A/B tester 5x better. I made it an easy, obvious choice for anyone using TubeBuddy to switch to ThumbnailTest. You can do the same. Just care way more about one small problem than anyone else has.

What are your goals for the future?

I want Flightcast to be my magnum opus. I want to build something so good it redefines the expectations people have for what a tool like this can do. You can follow along on X or my website. Listen to this podcast. And check out Flightcast!