John Rush came onto my radar when he acquired a website builder, Unicorn Platform, for $800k. He's a really interesting entrepreneur and now he's building a holding company of bootstrapped startups. John joined me for an interview where he talked about his holding company MarsX, why product beats distribution and his journey from VC startups to bootstrapping.
Why did you leave the VC world to bootstrap your own startups?
I felt like I was the only one trying to focus on users and value for the users, and everyone else in the VC startup world was obsessed with conferences, the next funding round, and media press.
Also, I moved to a Turkish village with my family and my VCs would always push me to travel to their office. It felt like I was an employee and they were my bosses. Which is in fact the reality for most founders of VC backed startups. You can't say no to VCs. You have to pretend their jokes are funny. Then I saw indie makers on Twitter, followed them for a while, and saw that their approach resonates with me a lot more than the VC approach.
Can you explain what MarsX is?
It’s a universe of products, e.g. a Holdco that aims to create a full ecosystem of tools to ideate, build, grow and monetize startups.
The core product is Mars IDE that let’s us build SaaS, apps and directories using nocode, lowcode, AI and full code. A perfect mix that makes the whole process ultra productive. I can ship few products every month.
// pop-up with indie acquisitions offer