Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q can do it this well. So if you want to install post hog, 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. Uh, how did you get users to boot.dev and how did you grow this business?
A So from zero to about two K 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 were like, 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, will naturally trust you a lot more. So then from 10 K to 30 K, 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 30 K 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 s…
AI assessment note: “from zero to about two K a month, we really grew from my blog”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Okay, let's talk about ideas. How'd you find this idea?
A Yeah, so I was a back-end 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.
AI assessment note: “the impetus for the whole thing was I was trying to hire Go developers.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Let's go back. Let's, uh, if you can give me a little bit of a timeline of what it looked like, uh, how you came up with the idea for this and, you know, what were you doing before you're running this huge business?
A Yeah. So I was making about 200 K total comp at the time, leading just a small team of three at that time. I've always wanted to build a business. I've always wanted to get out of the, the nine to five employee work. The business, BootDev, had just started making about 2000 dollars a month. So multiply that by 12, it's like 24 K, 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, it's making two K 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. Cause obviously I'm earning 200 K 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, uh, the CFO, 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 boot dev. And so he gave me the angel funding, it was 330 K, but it gave me enough of, like, assurance that, okay, we could at least have a couple years of runway to try this new business.
AI assessment note: “I was making about 200 K total comp at the time, leading just a small team”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q 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?
A 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.
AI assessment note: “The first was a content differentiation. So we're serving this Market of people”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q That's great. Let's talk about, uh, monetization. Um, 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, uh, customer journey typically looks like?
A It was really kind of experiment at first of like, Could we just, like, 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.
AI assessment note: “make all the content free? And you lose interactivity after a certain point if you're not a paying member.”
Not addressed raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.30
Q All right, let's talk about building. As a developer, how did you take this idea from zero to one?
A So you should have a very good idea of who you're building for and what problem you're 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.
AI assessment note: “So you should have a very good idea of who you're building for”
