Amy Hoy

Amy Hoy is a Tucson, Arizona–based web developer, interaction designer and teacher who became one of the godmothers of the bootstrapper movement. After years of frustration as an employee and consultant whose projects were often axed before shipping, she and her husband, JavaScript developer Thomas Fuchs (creator of script.aculo.us and Zepto.js), set out in 2008 to build a cheerful time-tracking app of their own.

That app, Freckle — now called Noko — was built over a few months of part-time hack days and launched with a single great feature: fast time entry. In a Mixergy interview roughly two years after launch, Amy openly shared that it had grown from about $1,300 in its first month to a run rate of around $190,000 a year, an early example of the revenue transparency the indie community later embraced.

Alongside software, Amy built a teaching business. With Alex Hillman she runs Stacking the Bricks and the flagship 30x500 course, built around Sales Safari — her research method of studying where an audience already talks online to find painful problems worth selling solutions to. Her products include the book Just F*cking Ship, The Tiny MBA, Sales Safari 101 and the free Ship in Six course, and her ideas about product-first, audience-first, risk-averse bootstrapping have influenced a generation of indie makers.