Blakney: LiveLingua took seven years to reach seven figures in revenue
Ray Blakney · $500K Profit With Time for Family Beats $1M and Misery · Mar 1, 2022 · at 10:45
Ray Blakney, co-founder of online language tutoring business LiveLingua, discusses the slow, sustainable bootstrapping trajectory of his business.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I joke that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be called Seven Years for Seven Figures and nobody would buy it. That's what it took us. I mean, you know, we built it bit by bit every year. First year was like, 40,000 dollars and we went up to 60,000 dollars, like about 20% every year.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ray Blakney
Blakney: SaaS Sells for 10x to 20x Multiples at Seven Figures
“That's why SAS sells for multipliers of 10, 20 X. If you can get it up to a d seven figure.”
Blakney: Raising weak skills from 20% to 50% beats marginal optimization
“Improving what you're good at. One percent is not gonna make as much difference as improving what you suck at from 20% to 50%.”
Ray Blakney: $500K profit with family time beats making $1M
“Most of us, I think would be perfectly happy with a business that made, you know, 500,000 dollars profit a year, right? You're taking over 500,000, but you could spend all your time with your friends and your family and your kids. We'll be fine. A million woul…”
Blakney: Stigma Leaves the Philippines with Almost No Therapists or Psychiatrists
“In the Philippines, you would, Like, there are almost no therapists and psychiatrists because there's just simply no work because nobody would go to them.”
Blakney: Most Successful CEOs See Therapists but Under 1% Discuss It
“I would be surprised if most successful entrepreneurs or business or CEOs have not seen a therapist or a psychiatrist at some point in their life. I'd be shocked. But I, the number of people who actually talk about it is probably like a fraction of one percent…”
Blakney: Firing underperformers reflects leadership vetting and training failures
“I don't enjoy firing people because part of it's failure on my part, as much as it's probably failure on their part, right? Either I didn't vet them right. I didn't coach them right. I didn't train them right. But for some reason they weren't able to do their …”