Interview: Amar Ghose, Founder & CEO of ZenMaid
On bootstrapping to 250k MRR, gettin the first hundred clients, running an all-remote company, and being productive as a digital nomad
This is the start of a series I’ve been wanting to do for a while: one where I interview people from a variety of fields, including scientist, startup founders, fitness pros, doctors, bloggers, and whoever else I feel curious enough to interview. Some of these interviews will be videos and some will be in writing.
This first one is a video, and appropriately it’s with an old friend. Amar Ghose is a friend I used to hang out with in San Francisco until he left town to live the digital nomad life in 2015, and I haven’t seen him in person since.
He’s also the founder and CEO of ZenMaid, a software-as-a-service company that automates scheduling for (mostly smaller) maid service companies. Amar founded the company in 2013, as an outgrowth of an in-house scheduling automation system that he had first built for his own maid company.
Over the past decade, Amar has bootstrapped ZenMaid to a quarter million in monthly revenue. Unusually, ZenMaid is all-remote, and Amar himself was living as a nomad– largely in SE Asia– for most of that time. Now he’s about at the point where he could probably retire if he wants to, which of course he doesn’t. Here’s his story:
Timestamps:
0:00. Look, I’m gonna be up front about this. I haven’t spoken to him in a while and I sort of forgot how to pronounce his last name.
7:10 How he started ZenMaid and got the idea initially
10:30 Working with a technical co-founder as a non-technical co-founder
13:44 How they got their first few clients and just how much sales work it really took (hint: a lot)
17:55 Inflection points at which ZenMaid’s growth strategy had to change
23:05 ZenMaid’s financials. Pricing, revenue and very approximate cost and profit figures
27:55 Business writers and influencers Amar follows. We spend a long time on this. Amar especially likes Gary Vaynerchuck, Tim Ferriss, and Alex Hormozi.
41:00 or so: Why passive income is overrated.
42:40 Amar’s work schedule and work-life balance. How he runs a company remotely– he’s lo longer a nomad (he and his wife are settled in Brighton, near London) but ZenMaid is still all-remote.
52:00 Somewhere around here we move away from talking about ZenMaid and talk more generally about staying productive as a digital nomad.
56:45 How Amar met his wife, and more generally how dating and relationships work for nomads. After that we talk about how he maintains strong friendships and social ties with people he doesn’t see very often.
1:08:00 What’s next for Amar now that he’s succeeded in building his startup and (at least for now) given up the nomad life.
If you want to hear more from him, Amar also has a blog and YouTube channel, but he’s mostly active on his X account these days. If you have any questions for Amar, your best bet is to ask them on X.
I’ll also be summarizing the main takeaways from this interview on my own X account (this might be the first time in my life I’ve actually called it X) later today.