Hitting $10M ARR with RPG-style programming courses

Lane Wagner was unimpressed by online education options for backend developers. So, he built what he views as the best educational content out there. And now, his RPG-inspired education platform, Boot.dev, is bringing in $10M ARR.

Here's Lane on how he did it. 👇

Fixing backed education

I'm a backend engineer with experience in JS/TS/Python and Go.

I always felt in-person or live education was too inefficient, but online education wasn't a great experience. Backend development in particular was underserved.

So, I started Boot.dev to teach backend online. And it has slowly morphed into the most immersive programming education platform available — thanks to us into interactive tooling and an RPG theme.

I went full-time on Boot.dev in 2022, and I've been full-time since. We're now a team of 13 and we just hit $10M ARR.

Starting with Markdown

The product started with a lot of Markdown — i.e. writing — and a lot of Go and JavaScript code.

Our stack is solid and should serve us well for a long time to come:

• Go

• Postgres

• K8s

• Docker

• GCP

• Nuxt

• Typescript

• Cloudflare

It has changed slightly from when we started, in that we're no longer using JS and Vue for the frontend. And of course the app itself has grown quite a bit.

Focusing on quality

These days, we work with external authors on our new courses. Our in-house editing team works closely with these authors and our video animators to ensure tip-top quality in everything we ship.

The future of online learning is quality first, not quantity first. So we focus on shipping slowly, owning our own content, and making it the best that it can be.

Organic content and paid ads

Outside of organic content, very little marketing was done for the first few years.

To this day, we mostly attract users via YouTube. We publish lots of organic content there, but now, we also work with influencers to get the word out. Blogging has been helpful for SEO, but video builds trust.

The fact that all our content is free to read and watch is actually crazy helpful for getting a lot of free traction and organic reach.

We're also getting pretty successful with direct-to-consumer advertising on YouTube, Google, and Meta.

Free content and paid features

All the content on Boot.dev is free to read and watch. The interactive features are paid (after a free trial). Specifically, paid features include:

• Boots, our mascot and AI assistant

• Writing and running code in the browser

• The CLI tool

• Certificates of completion

• Unlockable spellbooks (cheatsheets) and solutions.

It's a monthly or yearly subscription.

Stay lean and branch out

My biggest advantage has been staying super lean.

I only hire when I'm 110% sure I can effectively use the role. We'll probably hire a little more aggressively this year, but the goal is always the same: profitable, incremental growth.

I don't want to do mass layoffs due to overhiring (looking at you, ZIRP)

And a piece of advice: Do NOT try to sell to other indie hackers. Find a different customer base.

What's next?

I want to grow a lot. I see no reason Boot.dev shouldn't be the one-stop shop for the best coding and tech education in the world.

We already think that every course we ship is the absolute best out there. But it's gonna take us a while to ship courses on all the subjects we want to cover.

You can follow along on my X and Boot.dev's X. And check out Boot.dev.