$119K/Month Explaining Complex Topics Simply

Boot.dev is a gamified platform to learn backend development, founded by Lane Wagner in 2020 🚀

Ayush Chaturvedi recently tweeted, while sharing a graph of Boot.dev’s revenue from Indie Hackers…

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

Look at the growth in the last 4 months 🔥

From $23K in June to $77K in September.

And as of this writing, they’re up to $119,000 in monthly revenue 💰

Lane shared in a post from Feb 2022…

Having a large audience was my unfair disadvantage.

I started blogging about code in 2018.

The feedback that I consistently was getting from readers was along the lines of “Thanks, you have a talent for explaining complex topics simply.”

But…

The one thing I never understood well enough: The members of my audience had almost nothing in common.

And…

Having a large audience with members that don’t have a problem in common threw me off track for a long time. I’m now doing my best to figure out how I can continue to narrow down my target audience until everyone in that market loves Qvault.io [Now Boot.dev]

Sounds like Lane eventually solved that problem 🥳

A few months later he wrote…

After 2 years, we’ve hit $5k monthly revenue

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

They were only at $5k/month then, but I reckon they’d already laid the groundwork for $100k/month and beyond 📈

Back to Ayush’s tweet, he adds…

[Their] Top Channels of growth

– Podcast and YouTube appearances
– Sponsoring creators
– Organic [SEO Traffic]

Their social traffic is 90% YouTube.

This would be a mix of podcasts, YouTube interviews + sponsoring creators

One interesting video I came across: Lane doing a free 10-hour course on FreeCodeCamp’s YouTube Channel…

That video has 370K+ views 👀

That’s the kind of thing that has probably gotten Boot.dev a bunch of new paying customers. 

Which has me thinking: could you partner with a big educational YouTube channel in your niche? 🤔

Maybe you could emulate Lane’s approach with FreeCodeCamp, provide lots of value for free, build trust, establish your expertise, and get the word out about your product or service.

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