The {Modified} Stair Step Approach to Bootstrapping a Legacy

Don is currently an engineering manager at Google and co-founder of LanguaTalk which is making $1.2M/year.

The traditional stairstep approach is:

1. Build one predictable organic marketing channel. Traffic from SEO, WP.org, Shopify, etc.
2. Repeat until you own your time.
3. Build a standalone SaaS product (ex: Baremetrics, Drip, RightMessage, CartHook)

Don's modified stairstep journey was to:

1. Build a SaaS. Don made a SaaS with three friends called Body Boss: a fitness app challenged by lack of product-market fit. One of his co-founders wrote a postmortem about the failure.
2. Join a Silicon Valley-funded SaaS and then take it over. Don joined Kevy as an engineer, was promoted to CTO in six months, rebuilt the product, then acquired the business to run it as a solopreneur. After his fourth child Don sold Kevy and got a job at Google. Don goes into details of this step on Episode 567 of Startups for the Rest of Us
3. Build a two-sided marketplace. Don launched LanguaTalk with his cofounder in six months on top of BulletTrain. Having a cofounder that intimately knew both sides of the marketplace helped unlock an annual run rate of $1.2M/year.