Arvid Kahl - Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business

For Danielle, my one person.

I wouldnt be who and where I am without you.

Many people dream of having a business that makes money for them while they sleep. Yet, most people never turn that dream into reality. Life gets in the way, they say, and they arent cut out to be a business owner anyway.

I believe differently. I think that everyone can be an entrepreneur and create a sustainable business that will allow them to live a life of freedom and financial independence. It will require some sacrifice, as building a business will take a lot of work and time. But it will lead to a life of control, a life of choice, and a life of opportunity.

Zero to Sold will show you what the life of a bootstrapped founder will look like. It will teach you how to fill all the roles required to run a business and what you need to get done in each stage of your bootstrapped companys evolution.

No matter if you are just starting to think about being an entrepreneur, are in the middle of running a bootstrapped company, or are a seasoned founder, you will find useful strategies, thought-provoking anecdotes, and insightful concepts in this guide.

Zero to Sold will focus on examples from the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystem, as this is my area of expertise. Most advice will be applicable to non-software businesses, too.

While this is a guide, a manual, and a compendium, in the end, you are the agent of your own success. Carefully reflect if the advice in this book applies to your business. Read and learn as much as you can, but treat all guidance and direction as anecdotal. You will have to find your own combination of strategies and tactics. Zero to Sold will help you get there.

I wrote Zero to Sold because I've been through starting multiple bootstrapped businesses, growing a few, and selling one of them. Allow me to share the story of the one I sold.

Within two years, I co-founded, ran, grew, and finally sold a Software-as-a-Service business called FeedbackPanda, a productivity tool for online English teachers.

What many dont realize is that this was an overnight success many years in the making. FeedbackPanda wasn't my first rodeo. I've been part of many internet businesses before, and I've had my fair share of failures. I was in businesses where we never finished building the product. I co-founded startups that fizzled out because we didn't know how to market our service. I've been involved in companies that didn't find a way to monetize their popular products, only to pivot to something completely different after many years of trying to make it work.

I'll be sharing my experiences from both FeedbackPanda and the not-so-successful startups in this book, as I believe that you can learn the most at the intersection of experience and knowledge. So, I will provide you with both.

FeedbackPanda, the business that changed my life, was a service born out of necessity. It was a product that solved one critical problem for a well-defined audience, that allowed me to experience and learn the things that I have compiled into this book.

FeedbackPanda was a collaborative effort between me and my girlfriend, Danielle Simpson, who was an online English teacher at the time. We bootstrapped the business from day one, and when we sold it for what I would call a life-changing amount of money, the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) of FeedbackPanda had just reached $55,000.

Within two years, we had built a niche service from a proof-of-concept into a thriving business that was attractive enough for a Private Equity firm to take it off our hands.

So, where did this all start?

It started with a leg injury. In early 2017, Danielle suffered an injury that meant she couldn't leave the house for a while. For a trained Opera singer like her, that made regular work impossible. You can't invite an audience of hundreds into your living room for a concert.

Danielle started looking for work she could do from home, and she found something interesting. A wave of Chinese companies had emerged that recruited native English speakers to teach English as a second language to Chinese students. She tried it out and was hooked immediately: it was a fun job, it could be done using just a laptop, and the pay was alright.

Shortly after, she found that there were several large online communities of teachers who taught for various Chinese companies. Danielle joined those online social media groups and forums and started hanging out with her virtual colleagues that numbered in the thousands at that point.

A few weeks into teaching on a full-time schedule, she noticed things that started as nuisances but quickly became painful problems. The teaching part of her job was great and fun, but certain formalities took way too much additional time.

The most noticeable problem was student feedback. After every 25-minute lesson, the teacher would have to write a few paragraphs of a lesson report that was supposed to inform the parents of what their child had learned, how well they learned it, and what they could practice at home. Having only five minutes between lessons to take care of this and everything else (ranging from grabbing a coffee to using the restroom), Danielle would defer this work until after she was done teaching for the day. It couldn't be avoided, as the Chinese companies would not pay teachers for their teaching work unless the feedback was provided as well.

When Danielle started teaching 10-hour days, the added feedback time would often amount to almost two hours of unpaid overtime. That meant two hours less for spending time with me, meeting friends, or reading a good book.

So she did what anyone would do: she developed a system, using Excel sheets and Word documents to track information about what her students learned, how they did, and what to suggest to their parents. She started using text templates for the content of the lesson and the preparation hints, as the Chinese schools defined the curriculum, and it could be used as a template for every student.

We found out that many other teachers did the same when they started talking about their self-built solutions in their online communities. Teachers began to share their templates through Google sheets. It was clear that this was a shared problem in a very tight-knit community.

One day, Danielle and I talked about the painful experience of student feedback, and how her system, even though it helped, was clunky and overwhelming. I looked into it, and it seemed quite possible to build a web-based application that would do this work faster and more reliably.

We also saw that this would be a great business opportunity. There was a sizeable market with an apparent, shared, and critical problem. The problem was solvable, but no one had yet built anything to make it noticeably easier. So we decided to build a validation prototype, to see if it had a meaningful impact on Danielle's day-to-day workflow.