The Story
Lane Wagner built Boot.dev, an interactive online learning platform for software engineers, to almost $1M/month. The platform focuses on back-end development (databases, infrastructure) - an underserved market compared to front-end dominated online learning.
As Lane explains: "I built an online learning platform for software engineers to almost $1 million in monthly revenue, sitting usually around 30K a day at the moment. It's an online learning platform for software engineers and it's very interactive. That's kind of the defining unique trait of it. Really, we're just trying to get you doing as close to what you would be doing in the real world as a software engineer."
The Business Model
"It's a coding first platform where you write a ton of code both on your local machine and in the browser. And all of our content is free. There's about 30 courses, but you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying member. And we're currently sitting at 25,332 active paying members."
The Origin Story
"I was making about 200K total comp at the time leading just a small team of three. I've always wanted to build a business. I've always wanted to get out of the 9 to 5 employee work."
"The business Boot.dev had just started making about $2,000 a month. So multiply that by 12, it's like 24K, right? And then take into account any expenses, like you're basically not making any money."
Getting Angel Funding
"I'm talking with my wife about this. I'm like, you know, it's making 2K a month. Like that's not so bad. And I really like it. And I feel like if I put more time into it, we could grow this thing. She was incredibly nervous about that idea cuz obviously I'm earning 200K. We've got our second child on the way. She did not like the risk."
"As it happens, the CFO at the company I was working at went to go work with an ex CEO of mine, so a mutual friend, and I went and pitched him and his partner on the idea of investing in Boot.dev. And so, he gave me the angel funding. It was 330K, but it gave me enough of like assurance that okay, we could at least have a couple years of runway to try this new business."
Finding the Idea
"I was a back-end engineering manager and the impetus for the whole thing was I was trying to hire Go developers. This is back in 2020. I was having a hard time. Like, I'd open up a job position and I'd get like five, six, seven people applying for the job."
"It really just seemed to be that people getting into coding were gravitating towards the front end side and almost being pushed to the frontend side by online learning platforms. So it just seemed to me like there's this huge vacuum in the market where if you wanted to learn back-end stuff, you want to learn databases, infrastructure, it's very hard to do it online."
The Purple Cow Strategy
"In this market, online learning, you've got to differentiate pretty hard because there's a lot of competition in the space. We kind of had different differentiators along the way as we grew the business over the last four years."
"The first was a content differentiation. So, we're serving this market of people that want to learn back-end technologies and just aren't finding the resources because front-end is so dominant in the online learning space."
"The next differentiator was you should make your thing feel totally different, totally unique. And I was really inspired by Seth Godin's book, The Purple Cow. Fantastic marketing book. But the basic idea is when someone lands on your site, as a new entrepreneur, it can be really tempting to go look at a bunch of competitors websites and like, 'Oh man, they're so beautiful. They're so well-designed. I should make my website look like theirs.' Absolutely. You should not do that."
Building the Product
"You should have a very good idea of who you're building for and what problem you're solving and you should just solve that problem, but you should solve it really well because if you don't have a great solution, you're not going to break into the space."
"But you should tightly scope what you're building. I see this mistake all the time, too. The idea of just packing on new features, solving different problems. You should only be listening to what problems your customers have, and then you should be filtering out any problems from customers that aren't exactly the type of customer that you want to serve."
"In my opinion, the most dangerous thing you can do is try to serve multiple customer personas."
MVP Philosophy
"I think a lot of people even myself as I launched Boot.dev think about this incorrectly. MVP doesn't mean shitty product and it can't mean that. If it does mean that for you, your product is going to flop pretty hard. You should shoot for minimum quantity, not minimum quality."
Growth Strategy
"From zero to about 2K a month, we really grew from my blog. It was great for finding people that were really interested in the product and we did a ton of product development over those first 12 months."
"But then we weren't growing, right? We started to feel a lot more confident in what we were building, but we just weren't getting enough people in the door for it to make sense as a business."
Influencer Marketing
"What we quickly found was that trust building, especially in the education space, is extremely important. So, working with influencers was like a cheat code because the influencers are already trusted by their audience. So, if you can get an influencer to try your thing and like it, you kind of unlock a new little section of the market because now their followers will naturally trust you a lot more."
"From 10K to 30K, we really grew a lot off the back of these Free Code Camp collabs, which was basically me recording an 8-hour course, giving it to Free Code Camp for free so they can publish on their YouTube channel and us getting some exposure through that."
Scaling to $1M/Month
"Going from 30K up to where we're at now, which is almost a million a month. We had to scale what we were doing. Like I wasn't going to be able to create all this video content that was going to drive that amount of traffic."
"YouTube integrations, YouTube marketing, we've been able to scale that with other creators. And the unique kind of cheat code that we have as Boot.dev is that we have such strong affinity with gaming audiences. So, we've actually done most of our YouTube influencer marketing to gaming audiences rather than coding audiences."
Finding the Right Influencers
"The most important thing is finding the right several influencers to test with. And the easiest way to find the right ones is to talk to your existing customers. Hopefully, you have some. Go ask them who they watch, right? Who they listen to. This has been the best way for us to source new influencers to work with."
"Also, if you're going to work with influencers, there's one giant exploit that you can take advantage of that doesn't work in most other channels, which is if you're incredibly easy to work with and you do a lot of work for the influencer, you can get better deals. If you can shoot your own B-roll for the influencer, there's a lot more room for arbitrage when doing one-off deals with influencers."
Product vs Marketing
"I think the right way to think about where you should be spending your time, whether it's on the product or marketing, assuming you're a small team, is that the product is the thing that really is non-negotiable. You need the product to be good and you need to have confidence in the product before you spend a lot of time and money marketing the product."
"There's a minimal amount of marketing you do need to do to get some initial users to get product feedback. But in that first, pre-product market fit cycle, all your focus should be on the product and making the product solve the very specific problem for very specific person that you're trying to get it to solve."
Business Numbers
- •~$1M/month revenue
- •25,332 active paying members
- •30 courses (all content free)
- •$5.7M revenue in 2024
- •$2.5M profit after expenses
- •$2M spent on marketing
- •$300K cost of goods sold
Tech Stack
- •Golang (backend)
- •PostgreSQL (database)
- •Google Cloud + Cloudflare
- •Kubernetes, Docker
- •Vue, Nuxt, JavaScript, TypeScript
- •PostHog (analytics)
- •SendGrid (email)
- •Stripe (payments)
Day in the Life
"I've been working from home since the pandemic. Most days I have one meeting. And when I say meeting, I actually often mean something like this. Like something on my calendar where I'm hopping on a call with somebody. Maybe we're recording a podcast. Maybe we're recording something for YouTube."
"And the rest of my time I'm spending writing courses. Like, and it really is that simple. I wake up, I get my coffee, I start writing courses. Later in the day, I have a meeting. Maybe it's an internal one. I honestly only have like three of those a week these days."
"I've got a two-year-old and a four-year-old. Third one on the way next month. So, writing courses and trying to spend time with the kids and family."
Key Advice
"There's really two mistakes I see people making. The first one, I think, is to think about your business education as a content consumption phase and then an action phase. I think that's absolutely the wrong way to approach business. The biggest mistake is not taking action early, not starting a side project."
"The second biggest mistake I think is just focusing on kind of general content consumption about business and not digging into something really hard and specific."
"I think a lot of founders get way ahead of themselves thinking like, I'm going to be the CEO. I'm the idea guy, right? I'm going to delegate everything. I'm going to hire that salesperson, hire that marketer, hire that developer. But omitting the hard skills is a big mistake."
"If you're a developer, it may be really important to go and learn that marketing thing. Or if you're a marketer, it may be really important to go and learn that developer thing depending on your business."
Resources
- •Boot.dev: https://boot.dev/
- •Follow Lane Wagner on Twitter