I made $1.75M bootstrapping products for developers. AMA!

For me, it was good content and always having email subscribe forms in the footer or sidebar. GoRails.com does

The quality of your subscribers matters too. Some people have a 100k mailing list, but 4% open rates. I'd rather have a much smaller list with 50%+ open rates.

I was able to get 2k subs by posting to Product Hunt with something that took less than a week to build.

How can you add a ton of value to your audience? (The best thing is to build something for yourself that others would find valuable as well)

Thanks @prasanth_p! That's why I want to share. Hopefully I can inspire other people to build their own businesses. 💪

Quite the opposite, it's been growing a ton, especially with the new Hotwired.dev framework being launched in December 2020.

Haha! Yeah, people are just drawn to whatsever the newest cool thing. Rails still is focused on making very small teams super productive and I think there'll always be a market for that.

This total includes PayPal revenue which has been a good chunk of revenue. Lots of customers around the world and not all of them have credit cards like is so prevalent here in the US.

My revenue graph is actually steady growth (with the exception of Black Friday). The only times that revenue grows drastically is launching a new product. I try to launch something new at least once a year, so that helps. That doesn't necessarily mean a new product, could just be a big improvement on an existing product.

No, but I would love to. That would be such a cool way to support customers and help them even more.

Who said I ever stopped hating it? I still feel that way every time I'm editing. 😅

I will say, a better mic did help make it sound more natural. I use a Shure SM7B now.

I just dug up my original post trying to see if anyone was interested in my idea for GoRails. https://excid3.com/blog/would-you-like-to-become-a-better-programmer

Basically, I had been writing blog posts about random things, some of them being about Rails, others not.

At some point I thought I should buy a domain specifically for my Rails content, so I bought GoRails.com and moved everything to it. This had some links from StackOverflow that drove traffic fairly quickly to it.

I used that audience (which was tiny) to see if there was interest. The responses to that form were really interesting and started conversations with several people. It gave me enough confidence to launch a course for GoRails. I was scared to commit to weekly screencasts, so I tried a course instead.

That didn't go over well because nobody knew who I was, so why would they buy my course? I realized I'd need to share free content. It was great practice on its own since screencasting is very hard, but it also showed people that they could learn things from my videos and they might just be worth paying for.

So it was a combination of SEO and sharing free content in the beginning that drove my first 10 customers. When I started charging for the weekly screencasts, some people freaked out, but others were supportive (like @nomad7 ❤️).

First customers for Hatchbox and Jumpstart were easy, they were GoRails members since the products are for the same audience. Feels like cheating, but the best way to launch a product is to an existing audience. You can skip the slow first months and have a lot of users immediately.

That's definitely been tough! Every project needs time each week, some more than others.

I try to prioritize support first. Customer service is important, so I make that a priority.

Then I'll work on GoRails since it needs new content every single week. Luckily, I can use ideas from other projects to give me new content ideas and kind of kill two birds with one stone there.

The nice part about products like Hatchbox or Jumpstart Pro is that once you've completed most of the features, you can run and maintain them. There's usually not super important features to add, so I can leave it lower down the priority list once support and GoRails is done.

It's definitely a balancing act and you have to make sure the products mesh well together otherwise you'll lose your mind trying to run multiple products at once.

Most of the traffic is organic now that I have a lot of content out there. Years of producing things and getting indexed by Google helps a lot.

At this point, I wish I had hired a team sooner. It would make life a lot easier now, but I think I also had something to prove to myself. I wanted to see how far I could get on my own for whatever reason. It was good for a while, but it starts to get pretty stressful when you're running several products alone. I know I can't keep that up forever, so I wish I would have hired and thought more about the long-term sooner.

Screencasting is probably one of the hardest things I've done. Congrats on getting through your first course! That is an accomplishment. I think it's just been the years of practice, doing videos every single week for like 7 years. I don't want to really spend much time editing, so I have tried to practice recording as if we were pair programming and we're just chatting about a problem and how to solve it.

It is just me and one person part-time right now. I have tried to optimize each product to require as minimal maintenance as I can. The weekly screencasts is still a big commitment, but if I can make content on things I'm doing on other projects, then I get to kill two birds with one stone. I don't have to do a lot of research and practice that way. For screencasts that do require that, I have to spend like 40 hours to make one video. Whereas if I'm building a feature for Hatchbox.io that is fresh in my mind, I can make a screencast on it in like 2 hours.

Same goes for Hatchbox and Jumpstart Pro. Once they're kind of "feature complete", the majority of work is doing support or simple maintenance. It is just the initial development and year or two of fixing bugs and solidifying the product that takes the big effort. I try to do only one big new project at a time because of that.

Hi I am trying to find early stage saas builders to see if my saas can help them grow their audience. It creates an ecosystem of complementary products. Could we chat?

The thing I enjoy most is helping other people build products, so I'm sure I'll continue along those lines. Might be courses or other SaaS ideas.

For example, I recently built https://jobboardly.com on as a Jumpstart Pro app to help launch job boards quickly and easily. Dog fooding it with my own Ruby on Rails job board on GoRails. It still needs some features, but it's nicely aligned with everything else I'm building.

I have definitely been intentional about it. Most importantly, it's only for subscribers, so the quality of people is high by default. Public groups tend to get a lot of terrible posts and it is very hard to deal with.

Alongside that, I love talking with other developers, so I try to make sure it's welcoming and get to know as many people as I can. I'll try to introduce people so that the community can meet each other and connect. That makes it a really tight knit group over time. You've definitely become one of those people and I'm so happy to have you!

All the jobs are from companies posting directly to it. I'm not curating any of them myself, but it'd definitely be nice to include some additional curated ones that don't know of the job board yet.

I don't actually know the exact revenue split. I only really pay attention total revenue. Since GoRails is the main brand and where people typically find me, I would imagine it's 50% or so.

Everyone I've talked to has hit a plateau with their screencast business and had a damn near impossible time trying to break through it. That's what lead me to adding the other products over time.

You could absolutely go straight to building the products. I think most people do. For me, I was trying to figure out how to go full-time on my own business and selling courses is often much quicker to make a living than a SaaS.

Anytime you build a product for yourself, there's a strong probability other people will need it too. I would definitely try it.

Feel free to shoot me a DM on Twitter or email if you'd like to chat more about your products. 👍

I'd say it's about 50/50 these days. I spend a lot of time doing support and things, and that's grown over time. I try to optimize my day so I'll code in the mornings when I can think clearest and other work in the afternoon when I need a change of pace.

Most definitely. You can always start niche and expand it. It can be hard to build something generic and sell it into niches.

It took me about 2 years. 12 months into GoRails I made it to about $500 MRR. By the end of the second year, it had grown to about $3500 MRR. That was just enough to scrape by living cheaply in the Midwest where I'm from.

I filled in the gaps with consulting and a job during those two years. Afterwards, being able to focus full-time on the business helped it grow a lot quicker.

1. I shared my videos on Reddit and other places where Rails developers were hanging out. Some people started sharing my tutorials on places like StackOverflow which really helped to bring in the organic traffic.

2. That is a great question. There's not a lot of education past beginner content. You have tons of introductory things, so trying to do intermediate and advanced topics helped stand out. Developers are often cheap (especially with education), so I had to deal with $19/mo and just let it grow slowly over time.

3. I'm helping them think through problems and how to approach them was very helpful. They learn how to think about it from me, which builds trust and if I launch a product, they'll know that it was built with the same thoughtful approach that they trust.

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