My Coding Game Makes $1M Per Month

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My Coding Game Makes $1M Per Month

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Apr 30, 2025

This is how Lane Wagner went from working 9-5 as a developer to building his own $1M/month learning platform.

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Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:36 - Boot dev business breakdown
2:07 - The secret sauce to his business
3:01 - Background
4:15 - The idea
4:50 - Building the product
6:10 - Using posthog for analytics
8:00 - Growing the business
9:34 - Collaborating with influencers
10:22 - Building products people love
11:06 - Monetizing the business
12:03 - Tools and tech stack
12:50 - Costs to run the business
13:34 - Day in the life
14:33 - Advice to new founders
15:59 - Micro saas ideas

This video is an educational case study of one founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

Chapters

Stack

Transcript

Chapters

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No tools listed for this business.

I built an online learning platform for software engineers to almost one million dollars in

monthly revenue sitting usually around 30k a day at the moment

How does this guy make a million dollars a month when he has hundreds of competitors

in a saturated market

And a lot of that growth is due to something I call the purple cow strategy

Lane is a software engineer who decided to start a side project called boot dev

It started to make a little money until one day he came across a marketing channel that

would explode his business

The big shift was going from just blogging to starting boot

I sat down with Lane for a couple hours to learn about his story and figure out what

it really takes to build an eight figure business as a developer

And good news is he shared everything including why you should never copy someone else's business

idea what most people get wrong about MVPs and a full breakdown of his revenue costs

and everything you want to know about his million dollar per month business

Now let's get into it

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right

Welcome Lane

Welcome to the channel

Tell me a little about who you are and what you built

Yeah my name is Lane Wagoner

I'm the founder of boot dev

It's an online learning platform for software engineers and it's very interactive

That's kind of the defining unique trait of it

Really we're just trying to get you doing as close to what you would be doing in the

So we're trying to like un sandbox the experience and have you go through the courses like you

would in the real world

And we're making almost a million dollars a month at the moment

Can you give me a further breakdown of how this works as a business

What's the business model here

So it's a coding first platform where you write a ton of code both on your local machine

and in the browser and all of our content is free

There's about 30 courses but you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying

member

And we're currently sitting at 25 332 active paying members

You built this website to almost a million dollars a month

There's a lot of coding courses and a lot of stuff out there

What did you do differently

What is your secret ingredient for this business

In this market online learning you've got to differentiate pretty hard because there's

a lot of competition in the space

We kind of had different differentiators along the way as we grew the business over the last

four years

The first was a content differentiation

So we're serving this market of people that want to learn back end technologies and just

aren't finding the resources because front end is so dominant in the online learning space

The next differentiator was you should make your thing feel totally different totally

unique

And I really was inspired by Seth Godin's book The Purple Cow fantastic marketing book

But the basic idea is when someone lands on your site as a new entrepreneur it can be

really tempting to go look at a bunch of competitors websites and like oh man they're so beautiful

They're so well designed

I should make my website look like theirs

Absolutely you should not do that

Let's go back

If you can give me a little bit of a timeline of what it looked like how you came up with

the idea for this and what were you doing before you're running this huge business

Yeah

So I was making about 200K total comp at the time leading just a small team of three at

that time

time I've always wanted to build a business

I've always wanted to get out of the nine to five employee work

The business BootDev had just started making about 2 000 a month

So multiply that by 12 it's like 24K right

And then take into account any expenses like you're basically not making any money

So I'm talking to my wife about this

I'm like you know it's making 2K a month like that's that's not so bad

And I really like it

And I feel like if I put more time into it we could grow this thing

She was incredibly nervous about that idea because obviously I'm earning 200K a month

We've got our second child on the way

She did not like the risk

Frankly I didn't even really like the idea of taking that much risk

So as it happens the CFO of the company I was working at went to go work with an ex CEO

of mine

So a mutual friend

And I went and pitched him and his partner on the idea of investing in BootDev

And so he gave me the angel funding it was 330K

But it gave me enough of like assurance that okay we could at least have a couple of years

of runway to try this new business

Okay

Let's talk about ideas

How'd you find this idea

Yeah

So I was a backend engineering manager and the impetus for the whole thing was I was

trying to hire Go developers

This is back in 2020

I was having a hard time

Like I'd open up you know a job position and I'd get like five six seven people applying

for the job

And so it really just seemed to be that people getting into coding were gravitating towards

the front end side and almost being pushed to the front end side by online learning platforms

So it just seemed to me like there's this huge vacuum in the market where if you wanted

to learn backend stuff you want to learn databases infrastructure it's very hard

to do it online

All right

Let's talk about building

As a developer how did you take this idea from zero to one

So you should have a very good idea of who you're building for and what problem you're solving

solving and you should just solve that problem but you should solve it really fucking well

Because if you don't have a great solution you're not going to break into the space

but you should tightly scope what you're building

I see this mistake all the time too

The idea of just packing on new features solving different problems

You should only be listening to what problems your customers have and then you should be

filtering out any problems from customers that aren't exactly the type of customer that

you want to serve

In my opinion the most dangerous thing you can do is try to serve multiple customer personas

What's your take on building MVPs

So I think a lot of people even I mean myself as I launched BootDev think about this incorrectly

MVP doesn't mean shitty product and it can't mean that

If it does mean that for you your product is going to flop pretty hard

You should shoot for minimum quantity not minimum quality

Okay so before we get into growth there's one thing that I wanted to ask you because

I was looking at the notes I noticed that you use PostHog for analytics the software

tool PostHog

And I just think that's super cool that both of us use this tool love this tool but I

just want to hear specifically how you use PostHog and how it helps grow your business

PostHog is great

I was super happy when we switched over because I was using a different product analytics

tool

We realized that PostHog is way cheaper PostHog's feature set is way more expansive

integrating with PostHog was super easy right

Their pricing model makes sense from a data usage standpoint

And to me the biggest thing was that PostHog feels like it's run by developers who know

marketing not non technical marketers

Anyways yeah I highly recommend PostHog for product analytics

Man I completely agree

PostHog is today's sponsor and I'm just going to go on their website real quick

This is PostHog

And by the way how freaking cool is their website

They got this crazy dinosaur shooting flames right here

But for anyone that's launching anything and wants to track how their customers are using

their product you can install PostHog on your site with one line of code and they have

a very generous free plan so it's free to start

And once it's installed you'll have really good product analytics web analytics session

replay where you can see what people are actually doing on your website or in your product

They have A B testing they got surveys and they got more

One of my personal favorite features is the A B testing

And I'm going to show you an A B test for Starter Story right now in PostHog

And this A B test increased our conversion rate by over 300

You can see it right there

That's an insane number

And what I think is even cooler is that you can track the entire funnel of how this A B

B test affects the entire conversion flow and you can see that right here

A B tests like these are super important to our business and there's really just not like

another tool that really can do it this well

So if you want to install PostHog just click the first link in the description

You can install it for free

Just please let them know that you came from Starter Story

All right back to the video

Let's get into how Lane grew this business

Marketing and distribution

How did you get users to boot dev and how did you grow this business

So from zero to about 2k a month we really grew from my blog

It was great for finding people that were really interested in the product

And we did a ton of product development over those first year to 12 months

But then we weren't growing right

We started to feel a lot more confident in what we were building but we just weren't

getting enough people in the door for it to make sense as a business

And what we quickly found was that trust building especially in the education space

is extremely important

So working with influencers was like a cheat code because the influencers are already trusted by

their audience

So if you can get an influencer to try your thing and like it you kind of unlock a new

little section of the market because now their followers will naturally trust you a lot more

So then from 10k to 30k we really grew a lot off the back of these free code camp collabs

which was basically me recording an eight hour course giving it to free code camp for

free so they can publish it on their YouTube channel and us getting some exposure through

that

So going from 30k up to where we're at now which is almost a million a month we had

to scale what we were doing

Like I wasn't going to be able to create all this video content that was going to drive

that amount of traffic

YouTube integrations YouTube marketing

We've been able to scale that with other creators

And the unique kind of cheat code that we have as boot dev is that we have such strong

affinity with a gaming audience

So we've actually done most of our YouTube influencer marketing to gaming audiences rather

than coding audiences

Yeah

If you had advice for someone to go do their first influencer collab what would be like

a couple of bullet points on that

So the most important thing is finding the right several influencers to test with

And the easiest way to find the right ones is to talk to your existing customers

Hopefully you have some go ask them who they watch right

Who they listen to

This has been the best way for us to source new influencers to work with

Also if you're going to work with influencers there's one giant exploit that you can take

advantage of that doesn't work in most other channels which is if you're incredibly easy

to work with and you do a lot of work for the influencer you can get better deals

You can shoot your own B roll for the influencer

There's a lot more room for arbitrage when doing one off deals with influencers

Do everything you can to make their life as easy as possible

Let's talk about product

We can talk about growth channels all day but nothing's going to work unless you have

a truly great product that people love

So tell me what you think about that

I think the right way to think about where you should be spending your time whether

whether it's on the product or marketing assuming you're a small team is that the product is

the thing that really is non negotiable

You need the product to be good and you need to have confidence in the product before you

spend a lot of time and money marketing the product

There's a minimal amount of marketing you do need to do to get some initial users to

get product feedback but in that first pre product market fit cycle all your focus should be

on the product and making the product solve the very specific problem for a very specific

person that you're trying to get it to solve

That's great

Let's talk about monetization

What I think is cool about your site is that you kind of give away your stuff for free

and then you charge a small percentage of people who want that extra feature

Can you walk through how your business is monetized and what the customer journey typically

looks like

It was really kind of an experiment at first of like could we just make all the content

free

And you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying member

It worked

And I think the right business takeaway was let people really understand the product before

we ask them to pay for it

It was resonating enough with them

So that's again comes back to the like you do need to spend all this time iterating

on the product and making sure that you're actually solving the problem

And you need to be able to convince people that your product solves the problem before

the purchasing decision happens which just so happens in our case to be a longer free

trial or free demo of the interactive features

Well that's cool

And that brings me to my next topic which is you can just break down what kind of tools

and languages you use to build boot dev and also what tools you use to run the business

So for the tech nerds out there it is a fully custom built web app

So we use Golang on the back end Postgres is our database

We host everything on Google Cloud and Cloudflare

We use Kubernetes Docker Vue Nuxt JavaScript TypeScript

Again very very custom tech stack

For the marketing nerds out there of course we use PostHog for all of our product analytics

and we use SendGrid for all of our email stuff

We use their email API and using both together has I mean it eliminates another bill but

it also just makes integration easier

And then for the fintech nerds we're just using Stripe

Stripe is great

I can't imagine using anything else at this point

On that same topic these tools cost money

I'd love to get a little bit more details on the actual costs of this business not

just the tools but just the cost as a whole

What are the costs and margins look like for boot def

So our total revenue for 2024 was 5 7 million

The cost of goods sold on that revenue was only 300k

So we spent around 600 000 to 700 000 last year on salaries and like full time contractors

And then the bulk of our expenses were marketing expenses

We spent almost 2 million on marketing leaving us an actual profit at the end of the year

of around 2 5 million

Cool

All right

Well that kind of ends the technical section of the interview

I'd just love to hear a little bit more about your personal life or just your regular life

What does a day in the life look like for you

You work from an office or you work from home or what does that look like

I've been working from home since the pandemic

So most days I have one meeting

And when I say meeting I actually often mean something like this like something on

where I'm hopping on a call with somebody

Maybe we're recording a podcast

Maybe we're recording something for YouTube

And the rest of my time I'm spending writing courses

And it really is that simple

I wake up

I get my coffee

I start writing courses

Later in the day I have a meeting

Maybe it's an internal one

I honestly only have like three of those a week these days

Maybe it's an external one like this video

And then I'm back to writing courses or doing product design type work

maybe working on a new ad that we're running

At some point during the day taking my kids to the gym

gym I've got a two year old and a four year old

Third one on the way next month

So writing courses and trying to spend time with the kids and family

Nice nice

So yeah working on the product exactly where you should be

Last question that I have for you is you know for anyone watching this

it's going to be a lot of people a lot of developers watching this

What advice would you have to someone who does want to start a business like you

If you could stand on Lane's shoulder when you're just starting out what would be your advice

There's really two mistakes I see people making

The first one I think is to think about your business education

as a content consumption phase and then an action phase

And I think you know through traditional education

we're kind of taught to think this way right

I go to college for four years and then I do stuff

I think that's absolutely the wrong way to approach business

The biggest the biggest mistake is not taking action early not starting a side project

And the second biggest mistake I think is just focusing on kind of

of general content consumption about business and not digging into something really hard and specific

I think a lot of founders get way ahead of themselves thinking like

I'm going to be the CEO

I'm the fucking idea guy right

I'm going to delegate everything

I'm going to hire that salesperson hire that marketer hire that developer

But omitting the hard skills is a big mistake

It's important yeah

If you're a developer it may be you know really important to go and learn that marketing thing

Or if you're a marketer it may be really important to go and learn

learn that developer thing depending on your business

So I think that's great advice

All right Lane

Thank you for coming on

The business you built is amazing

Million dollars a month

month It's just so impressive

It's just so cool

Thanks so much for having me on man

Okay so Lane is the perfect example of how a solo developer can turn a side project into

thousands of dollars while still keeping his nine to five

But that comes with knowing the right information and finding the right problem that's worth solving

Now imagine there is a place that gave you

Problems to solve blueprints for building different businesses and the marketing strategies

that turn side projects like Lane's into million dollar life changing online businesses

At Starter Story we have a library of over 4 000 case studies business idea breakdowns

and a ton of other stuff where you can learn this

And it's all backed by data by real entrepreneurs just like Lane

Right here I'm looking at Lane's case study right now

We interviewed him a long time ago when his business was just doing a few thousand bucks

a month

I just think it's so cool that we were able to talk to Lane while he was still doing this

as a side project

This is the type of stuff that you'll get inside Starter Story

So if you're serious about building a profitable side project like Lane head to that link

in the description and you'll be able to download 52 micro SaaS ideas for free and

get started on your own journey of building something that might change your life

All right guys thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Peace

Starter Story

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