Boot.dev
The most captivating, finger-flying, addictive way to learn
We've still been having pretty incredible growth, though I'm sensing that we might be hitting a level where we need to take a few big swings to be able to unlock the next 10x - our current strategies got us from 50k->500k, but we need something new to go from 500k->5M...
Q1 2023 has been the first profitable quarter for Boot.dev! That's after paying myself and my employee's salaries, which are of course our biggest expenses. A couple key metrics:
- I launched Boot.dev (then called Qvault classroom) in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic as a side project
- In January 2022 we were making $1,000/mo
- In Summer 2022 we were making $6,000/mo and I raised $330,000 to go full time from an angel investor with the goal to simply become profitable quickly and never raise again
- Q1 2023 we are now profitable!
AMA if you wanna.
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Congratulations! That's awesome.
What are the plans for the future now that it's profitable?
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In this year (2023) the goal is to continually be profitable while raising salaries for myself and my employee!
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Congratulations on this massive milestone!
I have a few questions revolving around MVPs:
- How long did it take for you to complete the first MVP?
- How satisfied or unsatisfied were you with the first MVP?
- What type of feedback did you receive on it? Were they obvious fixes or did the feedback end up changing things drastically?
Congratulations again and I look forward to hearing your response!
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- Very quick - about a month to build the platform and the first iteration of the first course. But it kinda sucked.... it's so much better now
- Unsatisfied, but tbh I didn't yet have the skills to make it much better. It wasn't a time problem, but an experience problem
- I can't remember specifics from back then, but yeah I've been talking to users 1 on 1 all along
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Could you please tell a bit about how did you market your product and your current marketing strategies?
At the beginning of this year, I decided at Boot.dev that we needed to take Y Combinator's advice and build something that "A few people LOVE" instead of something that "a lot of people LIKE".
The idea is that if you have something a few people love, it's easier to go find more of those people, and since they love it, you'll have an easier time growing your userbase. If you have something that a lot of people just like, it won't grow via word of mouth, and you might even have a hard time getting those users to pay for it.
Anyhow, I think we've finally hit the milestone of "10 superusers", and we're now seeing the benefits. You can see who they are at the bottom of our leaderboard
The nice thing about having people that really love your product, even if its not a ton of people is that:
- You can interview them individually, and get qualitative feedback from them instantly about product changes.
- They are more forgiving about problems with the product, and even will help you troubleshoot from time to time
- You can turn them into advocates for your product. I'd rather have 10 users that talk about my product to friends than 100 users that don't.
- You can get testimonials from them
We're going to continue to "niche down" and focus on our superusers. What's similar about them? How can we find more people like them? etc.
Not much to say honestly other than we surpassed 15k signups. Most of them of course are in our free plan, but now that we're at 6k / mo I feel like we're getting real close to some serious traction. Have a niche figured out, interviewing customers weekly, it's going well.
I feel like we're circling the drain of product market fit. We now have around 10 "superfans", and the number of "normal" fans is increasing slowly.
We've learned this year that:
- Our best customers already have some form of higher education
- We should focus entirely on the backend niche
- We need to describe our uniqueness in a more concise way
- Advertising our opinions sets us apart in a crowded market
1 Comment
Hi Lane,
What an amazing milestone - congratulations! I also have an online education platform, but in the AEC industry (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction). I was wondering if we could chat sometime. We are currently looking for advice on how to grow; we are technical founders and lack marketing and distribution knowledge. 🫠 This is my platform if you're interested: www.thinkparametric.com.