AMA - I built a software company worth 8 figures

[Vasudev Soni]

I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

• Managing employees and building a team
• Subscription and permanent license based software
• Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
• Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
• Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
• General business advice, mindset, etc
• Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have

If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.

Do you have a thread about how you did it? Or something like a progress thread that I can follow.

I also run my own software company and want to figure out how to grow it more and more.

 

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[Vasudev Soni]

1. I initially coded a very bad prototype myself after buying a c++ book. I knew I needed a technical co-founder who could actually build the product.
2. We did 60/40 (i got 60%), then for future employees we both diluted equally.
3. Sure it's fine, in some cases maybe too much. I gave away too much in my opinion but whats done is done.


I can code a little bit but theres a zero percent chance of me being able to do what my team can. I haven't coded for the company since 2016. My technical ability is definitely on par with my programmers in terms of terminology and understanding. Our software is very technical by nature anyway. Having a technical background can prevent you from asking your team to do stupid shit that most likely isn't possible or having unrealistic expectations on how long something takes. I hired people who had similar projects and that made it easy.


Solve a problem and provide value, don't make something just because it seems like a good idea.


I don't have any patents, they are completely useless for software, hinder development, and you literally give out your "secret sauce" to everyone. Someone only needs to change a few things and have a few alterations to clone it *and* possibly do it better after you publish your patents. On my end I feel that it's morally wrong to patent software as it stifles innovation via patent trolling.


Reference my expectation thread here: NOTABLE! - Managing Your Expectations Is Everything! Expectations.. An Integral Piece To Your First Million In Sales.

And figuring out what you want: NOTABLE! - A fundamental question for any entrepreneur: What do I want from my business?


Racing gokarts, yoga, going out for drives, venting to friends or my coach. I'm not the best at stress management right now though.


Not sure on forums, but I'm sure they're still active in those programming servers yeah.


1. I'm alright at coding as mentioned above.
2. I didn't read a whole lot other than TMF . No other books inheriently stand out to me as recommendable other than "How will you measure your life?" by Clayton Christensen
I religiously read all of Successful Software before starting. In general, the journey has been pretty lonely and devoid of advice that applies to me as we're a desktop software company, not an online SaaS product.
3. We're all organic (YT, Twitter, FB group, Reddit, etc) and capture emails, we have never purchased emails or spent money on advertising. Most of revenue comes from people trying the software or through an email campaign. No affiliates as I want to control how content is presented to keep our brand on point.
4. I run the business, Co-founder (lead programmer), other 3 were programmers we needed for specific tasks relevant to our application.




Twitter and YouTube. Got us really far due to the "nature" of our software. Probably wouldn't work for a lot of SaaS products etc.

Thank you for this immensely valuable post.

 

[ZackerySprague]

Absolute Gold Mine.

Summary:
1. Raven built a "Desktop Software Company", not SAAS guys.
2. Used the power of others or Teamwork to create his product by giving up equity.
3. Does want or need patents, everything is a trade secret including the code that is built.
4. Found a job within his marketplace to get INSIDERS knowledge for the product he was creating.
5. Used the principles of Profit First by Mike Michalowtiz
6. Found his need based on a problem he encountered himself.
7. Used Social Media such as Twitter and YouTube to organically get customers.
8. Created an amazing product that others share.

 

[Sterling729]

Thanks for doing this. As a software dev myself and trying to get something off the ground, I'm planning on creating potentially a string of web apps all with the same stack (html/js, nodejs, sql server, AWS) so that I can get a mvp up and running quickly. If the current one doesnt gain traction I plan to quickly move onto building the next one.

My question is, should I immediately put a paid subscription option with each app that I start to build? This is just so that I can get a sense if there is real demand and if I should continue, rather than get user feedback with merely an "oh yeah, that's cool". I'm a bit unfimiliar with setting up the login setup with Cognito and using tokens from my nodejs to authenticate subscribers, and then have to find a reliable secure way of getting these users to pay. But I figure once I know how to do it, I can quickly replicate it the next time.

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

Thanks for doing this. As a software dev myself and trying to get something off the ground, I'm planning on creating potentially a string of web apps all with the same stack (html/js, nodejs, sql server, AWS) so that I can get a mvp up and running quickly. If the current one doesnt gain traction I plan to quickly move onto building the next one.

My question is, should I immediately put a paid subscription option with each app that I start to build? This is just so that I can get a sense if there is real demand and if I should continue, rather than get user feedback with merely an "oh yeah, that's cool". I'm a bit unfimiliar with setting up the login setup with Cognito and using tokens from my nodejs to authenticate subscribers, and then have to find a reliable secure way of getting these users to pay. But I figure once I know how to do it, I can quickly replicate it the next time.

I feel like you're setting yourself up to fail by planning a string of web apps. That tells me low quality for each, poor attempts, and money chasing.

Apps are a dime a dozen. Go forth and execute at 100% with full integrity behind it. It took like 6 months before we made our first dollar. And took 2 years to break $2k/m.

But I believed in our product and mission.

 

[Ravens_Shadow]

Do you have a thread about how you did it? Or something like a progress thread that I can follow.

I also run my own software company and want to figure out how to grow it more and more.

See the INSIDERS thread in my signature (on a PC) for the entire story. It's like 25 pages of everything I've done.

 

[Sterling729]

I feel like you're setting yourself up to fail by planning a string of web apps. That tells me low quality for each, poor attempts, and money chasing.

Apps are a dime a dozen. Go forth and execute at 100% with full integrity behind it. It took like 6 months before we made our first dollar. And took 2 years to break $2k/m.

But I believed in our product and mission.

Interesting, thanks for replying. I guess I'm just worried about wasting too much time on one app (and going for a shotgun approach I guess). Not really concerned about the money at the beginning, it's more of an indicator that I should continue to work on it.
Did you work on any apps prior to this one where you realized there wasn't a market and had to stop or pivot? Or did you mostly rely on prior experience and having a good sense what the market needs and the features you can put into the app?

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

Interesting, thanks for replying. I guess I'm just worried about wasting too much time on one app (and going for a shotgun approach I guess). Not really concerned about the money at the beginning, it's more of an indicator that I should continue to work on it.
Did you work on any apps prior to this one where you realized there wasn't a market and had to stop or pivot? Or did you mostly rely on prior experience and having a good sense what the market needs and the features you can put into the app?

There were a couple of things that I did before my main business but they weren't software related in particular, just services online. Both of which did make money, but I wasn't truly into solving the issues those services fixed. It was more so in my current business with the product that took 2 years to get to 2k per month that I should focus on our flagship product which within just a year after starting its development got us to $20k per month the month we launched it.

The flagship product was always the idea, it was just very difficult to create and I started with something smaller to learn the ropes of selling software and solving a simple problem to gain trust over a small user base.

I feel like the shotgun approach is an indicator that you don't have any strong conviction towards one particular product when I feel like that's what's going to give you the most success. This is just my opinion though.

 

[ZackerySprague]

How do I code "Hello World" in PHP? Haha just kidding!

 

[Zardiw]

I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

• Managing employees and building a team
• Subscription and permanent license based software
• Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
• Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
• Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
• General business advice, mindset, etc
• Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have

If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.

I don't know why you won't say what company it is.......or what it does........without that any info is of minimal usefulness...........Did you find some kind of niche?.........Develop something needed that didn't exist?..............What?.........lol....

One question I have is how did you advertise/get customers?

Z

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

I don't know why you won't say what company it is.......or what it does........without that any info is of minimal usefulness...........Did you find some kind of niche?.........Develop something needed that didn't exist?..............What?.........lol....

One question I have is how did you advertise/get customers?

Z

Buy fastlane INSIDERS and go read my thread with 700+ posts. I don't say it on the outside of the forum because I don't want google to link people (my customers or competitors) here. If the info is minimally useful then you should read this whole thread.

I got customers by posting videos of the product results on twitter and youtube. I also setup a small website to capture leads and build an email list of around 6,000 people before we actually launched our flagship product. Never paid for advertising.