$1.3M a Year Teaching Backend Courses

This is one of the most impressive revenue growth charts I’ve seen in a long time.

Look at the growth in 2023 🔥

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.

They did $1.3M in 2024 -

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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Whenever you’re ready, consider joining the Indie Masterminds community. The goal of this newsletter is to inspire and motivate you, but the goal of the community is to help you take action and go to the next level in your journey.

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