$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 while.

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!

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 -

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 -

And their social traffic is 90% YouTube.

This would be a mix of podcasts, youtube interviews + sponsoring creators -

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.

(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 -

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.

“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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🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don't want to miss -

Why every agency gets stuck at $50K/m revenue - From Jakob Greenfeld (my favorite tweet of the week)

How do you make $100m off 1M YouTube subscribers - From Shaan Puri

12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers - From Daniel Vassallo

How to get your first 100 paid users via FB groups - From David Park

Playbook behind the “overnight success” of PDF AI ($200K ARR) - From Damon Chen

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