$291K a month teaching backend courses

How Boot Dev reached $291K Monthly revenue teaching backend courses

$291K a month teaching backend courses
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This is one of the most impressive revenue growth charts I’ve seen in a long time.
Look at the growth in the last 6 months 🔥
From $23K in June to $76K in August.
And from $76K in August to $291K in December.
Crazy!
notion image
This is the backend courses platform Boot Dev.
It’s a platform where students can learn backend development in a gamified manner, and become high skilled to get a job as a developer.
Their landing page makes their value proposition very clear -
notion image
I asked their founder (Lane Wagner) on Twitter, what has been the secret of their recent success. He shared 3 channels -
  • Podcast and YouTube appearances
  • Sponsoring creators
  • Organic SEO
This checks out from their similarweb data as well.
Their top traffic channels are Direct, Search and Social -
notion image
And their social traffic is 90% YouTube.
This would be a mix of podcasts, youtube interviews + sponsoring creators -
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The most fascinating thing is their SEO strategy.
They rank for the keywords “[programing language] Playground” for most popular backend programming languages.
So when their ideal students search on Google, looking for an online playground environment to learn a language, Boot Dev’s playground pages show up.
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(source: ubersuggest)
SEO is a slow strategy, but when it works, it pays off BIG!
Finally, I want to emphasize that this is NOT on overnight success.
I found this post on their Indie Hackers page quite inspiring -
notion image
Took them 2 years to reach $5K MRR.
Always remember -
  • It takes a while to get to find PMF
  • To find your positioning in the market
  • To figure out WHY users love you instead of the competition.
This is a long journey, and we need a ton of patience and grit. Just like Lane and his team.
Hope you found this useful.
Cheers 🙌

You don’t need more product

Last week Dmytro on Twitter asked that he’s managed to reach $1700 MRR in 2 years. Should he continue with the project or try out other bets. He got some great replies to that tweet, worth checking out.
My opinion is that he has a great product, it takes a lot of effort to get something past $1K MRR. This is NOT the time to give up.
But this is also not the time to build more product.
I think if you have something that’s making $1000 MRR then you have enough features to take it to $5K MRR. At least.
You just need to go all in on marketing.

Don’t run out of motivation

Loved this quote from Rob Walling’s latest book - The SaaS Playbook.
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“Bootstrappers don’t run out of money, they run out of motivation”
So true!
I just finished reading the book this week, will write a short summary post soon.

That's it for today. Hope you found this useful.
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Ayush

Written by

Ayush

Eternally Curious. Writing, Learning, Building in Public. Writing about Ideas + Inspiration + Insights for creators, solopreneurs and indie hackers | Simple tips and frameworks to help you build a sustainable solo business

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