AMA - I built a software company worth 8 figures

[Phikey]

Awesome thread.
My questions:
1. Do you know how to code, yourself? How much do you need to know in order to hire developers?
2. What resources do you recommend for someone to learn and go down the same path? (podcasts, courses, books, communities)
3. What does your acquisition funnel look like? What's the split between channels (organic, PPC, email, affiliates, etc)?
4. What were the first 5 hires (in order) you made?

 

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[joshuajwittmer]

I met them on discord via a programming server I was part of.

Does your team still discuss programming on the same discord server, and can you recommend any other forums where programmers discuss this stuff?

 

[Phil Yu]

Congrats on your success!!

My question is, at the beginning, what did channel you use to sell? what was your initial market plan?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Bump. Just an FYI, @Ravens_Shadow has been an INSIDERS for years and his process thread on this company (complete with a ton of struggles) is chronicled on the Inside. It's quite a long read and already a book sized account.

Really cool to see someone go from nothing but an idea and a vision, to refusing 8 figure offers for his business.

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

1. From the number of people you identified, who had the specific skills needed to start & run the company; how did you decide who should fill the seat of cofounder? Was it based on the chunk of work the particular individual was going to be doing for the company?

2. Must equity be 50/50 between founder and cofounder?

3. Is 2% - 5% equity okay for an initial employee or should it be more or less?

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.

Great thread, I just have one main questions regarding your technical background.

You mentioned you don't code but at the same time you seem to able to understand what makes a good programmer/understand what programmers are talking about in a discord?

How would you rate your technical ability? And do you believe having a solid technical background is needed for software founders?

Reason I ask is because I sell database software to the techiest of IT departments without any real deep understanding of how our company's product works. I just know the problem customers have and how our product solves it, but if I were to go out and build a duplicate product I wouldn't know where to start in terms of what coding language experts I need to hire, what infrastructure I need to even build it on etc.

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.

Congratulations. I'm Isaac living in Africa, I have a master's degree in software engineering. I want to become an entrepreneur but I don't know where to start. What advice can you give me?

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

@Ravens_Shadow Thanks for responding to all those rapid-fire questions. Just to clarify: Even though they’re almost useless in your opinion, you still have a patent, right? Almost useless, but not completely useless?

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.

What would you say are the most important keys to your success in terms of preparing yourself and doing the work that needs to be done?

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?

Aside from exercise, what other stress management strategies do you employ?

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

Does your team still discuss programming on the same discord server, and can you recommend any other forums where programmers discuss this stuff?

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

Awesome thread.
My questions:
1. Do you know how to code, yourself? How much do you need to know in order to hire developers?
2. What resources do you recommend for someone to learn and go down the same path? (podcasts, courses, books, communities)
3. What does your acquisition funnel look like? What's the split between channels (organic, PPC, email, affiliates, etc)?
4. What were the first 5 hires (in order) you made?

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.

My question is, at the beginning, what did channel you use to sell? what was your initial market plan?

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.

 

[joshuajwittmer]

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

Thank you! I’ve definitely stifled myself at times by focusing too much on the long term vision, and spending too little time envisioning what the little wins in the near-term should look like.

 

[joshuajwittmer]

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

Hmmm... I’ve never really pondered the question in those terms before. Answering the clarifying questions you posed, I think I want a lifestyle business, but I definitely flirt with the idea of an enterprise. I gotta do some more considerin’

Thanks for the insight.

 

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[Marzook]

great work @Ravens_Shadow glad that you are kicking a##.

hopefully others can learn about your struggles and tribulations here.

 

[WillHurtDontCare]

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.

No questions yet - but as someone who has been both reading your posts for your and working on building a SaaS for months, I just wanted to pay my respects to all of the hard work that you put into it.

Wish you the best on the road to 10 figures.

 

[rsrs]

Thanks for this thread...invaluable.

You mentioned MVP launching as a hard time as sales dropped and you had quit your job.

1. Did you have other challenging times in the business? Did you ever consider to throw the towel?

2. Can you pinpoint a moment when you "got" the business in a sense that you could start a second one much much faster and better? Or does it never happened?

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

Thanks for this thread...invaluable.

You mentioned MVP launching as a hard time as sales dropped and you had quit your job.

1. Did you have other challenging times in the business? Did you ever consider to throw the towel?

2. Can you pinpoint a moment when you "got" the business in a sense that you could start a second one much much faster and better? Or does it never happened?

1. Even to this day I consider throwing in the towel occasionally because it's so difficult. But what else am I going to do? Sit around and do nothing..? Watch TV..? Go do something else..?
I'd love to know how people navigate this as well. I've never done something so difficult in my life. Is it a mindset issue for me? Maybe. I'm in a hard place in life right now. The business consistently challenges me, but one thing I do my best to do is to not over work myself, and over stress myself over this now. Every single time that I have had business issues or I've run into challenging times, I have solved those challenges every single time and I could have been so much less stressed than I was.

2. After our mvp launched and it really was clear that it was a homerun, I felt like I could do this again if I needed to. Once you really have that runaway success from all of your efforts finally coming to fruition, you have that gut feeling that you could do it again if you had to.

 

[chabs]

thanks for the ama Ravens shadow.

I have heard that hiring talent is particularly expensive/challenging for businesses in the software as a service niche like yours

This is due to significant demand for experienced people, when compared to the limited supply

How do you differentiate from competitors, attract people to work in your company, and deal with this type of challenge?

SaaS is one of the most scalable business types right now, and I am interested in going down that path. There are a lot of needs that can be solved!

 

[Ravens_Shadow]

thanks for the ama Ravens shadow.

I have heard that hiring talent is particularly expensive/challenging for businesses in the software as a service niche like yours

This is due to significant demand for experienced people, when compared to the limited supply

How do you differentiate from competitors, attract people to work in your company, and deal with this type of challenge?

SaaS is one of the most scalable business types right now, and I am interested in going down that path. There are a lot of needs that can be solved!

Some pros of working in our company that we publicize:

• Great team of really bright people to work with.
• Fantastic product to work on that is clearly making an impact in the industry.
• Completely remote forever, you'll never have to come into an office. You can live in any country you want.
• Fair and transparent salaries.
• Unlimited paid sick days and vacation + months of paid parental leave if needed.
• Great bonuses for holidays (We did $10k per employee this year)
• Free computers and other hardware as needed

So pretty straight forward. It's clear that we are paving a new path in the industry and really great applications just come in naturally. Hiring is difficult though.

 

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[joshuajwittmer]

I'd love to know how people navigate this as well. I've never done something so difficult in my life. Is it a mindset issue for me? Maybe. I'm in a hard place in life right now. The business consistently challenges me, but one thing I do my best to do is to not over work myself, and over stress myself over this now. Every single time that I have had business issues or I've run into challenging times, I have solved those challenges every single time and I could have been so much less stressed than I was.
Hey @Ravens_Shadow, I’m just gonna throw this out there because I’d love to be able to help you. You’ve offered me and others such valuable wisdom.

If you’re like “duh, Josh,” well I tried, and maybe this will help some people in here.

One of the most effective de-stress techniques is deep breathing. You don’t have to get out the yoga mat, or the gokart. Any time You feel stress you can do this and feel better.
I use a yogic breathing style where I exhale first and slowly empty my lungs. Then slowly fill them all the way up. Both the exhale and the inhale are done in three distinct phases- 1.diaphragm (belly), 2.rib cage 3. Top of the chest.

So when I feel stress, I blow all the air out- lift the belly, contract the rib cage, lower the sternum. Then slowly fill them up- lower the belly, expand the rib cage, lift the sternum.

It takes a little practice learning to identify each phase. I learned it from a book on yoga ages ago.

Thanks again. I hope this helps!

 

[L_T_R]

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.

Hi Ravens_Shadow,
Very inspiring and congratulations on all your success! I saw your thread and thought I would take advantage of your AMA offer. I am a finance guy but have recently developed a strong interest in the tech world; specifically areas such as automation and data science. I was intrigued by your comment of building a successful software company even if you can't code. I have begun learning how to code although I find it a steep learning curve and as we all know there are only so many hours in a day! I also work full time so being new to the world of entrepreneurship I am trying to learn where to best target my time energy for the highest returns. Definitely finding the whole "getting started" process a little overwhelming. Any insights you could provide would be a big help.

Thanks!

 

[Pharez]

I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers.

I learnt that VC presence in a business might reduce control and affect the priority of who the company satisfies between the customer and stakeholders...

With that in mind, is it better to bootstrap than take on investor money? especially when the project is gigantic & will go a long way with VC support.

Thank you.

 

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[watchopt]

I don't have any questions for now but thanks for doing this

Yes. Thank you for doing this. Kind of some of the framework I have had in my mind for a long time, just never had enough WHYs and too many pens, to act on it.

 

[Jfrench]

Some pros of working in our company that we publicize:

• Great team of really bright people to work with.
• Fantastic product to work on that is clearly making an impact in the industry.
• Completely remote forever, you'll never have to come into an office. You can live in any country you want.
• Fair and transparent salaries.
• Unlimited paid sick days and vacation + months of paid parental leave if needed.
• Great bonuses for holidays (We did $10k per employee this year)
• Free computers and other hardware as needed

So pretty straight forward. It's clear that we are paving a new path in the industry and really great applications just come in naturally. Hiring is difficult though.

Are you hiring technical writers? I am looking to move on from my current position (documenting an internal corporate real estate tool for a major phone service provider).

Thank you for sharing your journey and accumulated wisdom here! Reading between the lines, it seems like you placed trust in your co-founder and weren't too paranoid about the potential for them to steal your ideas. I hear you speaking to the value of execution (and the difficulty of it) over the value of the idea itself, although I get that both are necessary for success.

 

[Donal]

@Ravens_Shadow can you describe what your first sale was like? How long it took, how much was the first sale, what it felt like making the first sale, and how you felt about the quality of the first release to a customer?

I'm at that stage in the process, though I'm trying a business-to-business sale. Been working on the product for about 9 months. Feel like it's pretty good, but not good enough (it's a web-app). But hopefully the product is good enough to merit the first sale to the customer. I hope the first sale is big enough that it'll let me keep working on the software for another year, so I can keep improving it, get it closer to market-fit, etc. I'm at the point I hope the product could become self-sustaining, in that it'll bring in enough income for me to keep going for another year. (As a B2B sale, I'm hoping the first sale is about £10k ~ £20k for a year's license.) [The app is focused on trying to find efficiency savings in a costly, widespread process. So, given it's B2B in nature, we hope is the efficiency savings from the product merit the large licensing cost (being a fraction of the efficiency savings for the buyer). Though much of this is still experimental.]

Other thing is, I haven't seen you mention what the product is that you've built. Maybe you're keeping that hush-hush from the forum, or maybe I just missed it. What product is it you've built? Edit: just saw you said not to ask about that.

Regards

 

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[Seth Goodluck]

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.

Congratulations. You’re welcome to PM me and I’m happy to connect you to some others who have kicked a$$ but are still climbing.

If you haven’t yet, join YPO and EO (if you aren’t too old). Community of like minded people (like fast lane in some respects).

Also go learn Transcendental Meditation. Worthwhile practice. It’s like a spa day for the brain.

Finally, check out the book: “Leadership and Self Deception”. One of the few I genuinely recommend. Right up there with @MJ DeMarco book for sure.

Keep kicking a$$. I’ll see you somewhere on the ridge line soon enough

 

[JamesCasterlin]

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.

How important is mindset and what can someone do to develop the proper mindset?

 

[Mainstream7]

For the first version of your software, did you learn code and math to do it yourself?

 

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[TZA]

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.

Congrats. Really happy for you. I have a question. I recently hired someone to design my Shopify store but he is not doing satisfactory work, despite multiple warnings. What should I do in this matter?

 

[Mark98]

Congratulations. I'm Isaac living in Africa, I have a master's degree in software engineering. I want to become an entrepreneur but I don't know where to start. What advice can you give me?

Congratulations. I'm Isaac living in Africa, I have a master's degree in software engineering. I want to become an entrepreneur but I don't know where to start. What advice can you give me?

Hey Isaac, check out this video >>>

View: https://youtu.be/V2SYWpXR2jI
. It should help to answer your question.

 

[Ivex]

Amazing achievement, thank you for sharing and thanks for giving some of your time to answer questions.

Did you ever face a point where the workload exceeded your teams realistic ability to complete it, but you couldn't yet afford to hire more people? And how did you manage it?

If the answer is "No", could you speak more generally on how your personal workload changed at various stages of the business?

 

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[Itsmeantonios]

Considering you already have a successful business, what's with all the cloak and dagger?

It's really interesting how you built the company but I'm even more interested in what the software is. By the sounds of how technical and difficult it is to make, why not just say what the company is? I don't get it.

I have several ideas for software in my industry because all of the existing software sucks, but I don't know how to find out if other businesses in the industry would want what I want to make.

What is the best way for me to find out when I don't have anything to show them? Cold call businesses and try to survey them a bit? "Are you satisfied with the software. What do you like? What don't you like? What are the most important things you want the software to do? What would you pay for software that can do all of those things?"

Maybe put together a Google Forms survey and send it to contacts I already know in the industry and try to go from there?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

It's really interesting how you built the company but I'm even more interested in what the software is. By the sounds of how technical and difficult it is to make, why not just say what the company is? I don't get it.

There's no cloak and dagger, the details are provided on the INSIDERS forum where he posted a full account of his wins, losses, struggles, and more... a good 4 years worth, including the company name and its software. He's doing YOU/US a favor by taking questions here publicly while not having his wisdom quarantined behind a paywall.

 

[JFGD]

Hey @Ravens_Shadow congrats for your success!

I'm a software engineer working for a SaaS company that just reached 100M$ ARR ( not mine ) and I can definitely see some of the challenges. Have a couple questions:

1) Why you built a desktop software and not a SaaS? Was it a limitation as your specific software needed to be desktop for your industry/customers or was any other reasoning behind it?

2) Maybe it's also industry specific but it's the first time I heard about discord for finding developers. Was it because the type of people you are looking for navigate in Discord?

3) Do you offer equity to all employees? How did employees with equity reacted with the decision not to sell the company? Are you all on the same page re that decision?

4) I'm always thinking about building a software company ( usually SaaS but still ) but I think on my specific case knowing how to code also gives me some disadvantages as my thinkings are very drawn to the technical side of things and do not think so much on the actual business side of it. Do you think not knowing to code helped you on that regard?

Thanks a lot for the thread!

 

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[Qcard]

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.

Congrats! I have a software dev/consulting company but I have been trying, for years, to launch a SaaS product and have failed so far. The trick seems to be finding a niche or finding someone to work with in a niche. How much of your success do you feel can be attributed to you being able to do that?

 

[Itsmeantonios]

There's no cloak and dagger, the details are provided on the INSIDERS forum where he posted a full account of his wins, losses, struggles, and more... a good 4 years worth, including the company name and its software. He's doing YOU/US a favor by taking questions here publicly while not having his wisdom quarantined behind a paywall.

Ok I didn't know that. This topic come up in my email newsletter and was interested in checking it out. I have no idea what is it the INSIDERS forum.

I don't subscribe to the INSIDERS, so I have no idea what is in there.

I certainly appreciate a success story posting an AMA, though I still don't understand the risk of posting the company name ¯\_(ツ)_/¯