English Teacher’s $55,000/Month Software Business

Arvid Kahl writes about building and selling a successful software business…

In 2017, my partner Danielle was teaching English as a Second Language online to Chinese children. She was working 12-hour days teaching while I was working as a Software Engineer for a German company in the IoT space.

After teaching, Danielle would work for two extra hours to write Student Feedback for the parents of the kids she had taught that day. Two hours of unpaid work that consisted of writing the same things over and over again.

Fed up with all that repetitive, unpaid work, Arvid and Danielle wondered if they could build “a little software tool” to make things easier 🤔

They came up with a tool called FeedbackPanda. You can see an old version of the homepage here. 

Danielle’s description of it…

The tool saves teachers about two hours of unpaid time per day by helping them organize student and course records and write personalized feedback for students. Teachers can also use FeedbackPanda to collaborate and share their feedback templates to inspire each other.

Pricing was only $10/month or $110/year.

Within two years, Danielle and Arvid built the business to an incredible $55,000 in monthly recurring revenue 💰

And then…

… we sold the bootstrapped company that grew out of that tool to SureSwift Capital for a life-changing amount of money.

This story is a good reminder to keep an eye out for problems in your current line of work. Danielle had a big problem in her teaching job, which she turned into a big opportunity 🤑

She was able to solve her own problem and leverage her existing network – ie. other teachers – to get helpful feedback land their first customers.

How could you do something similar?

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