#277 – Addictive Products, Embracing A.I., and Crossing $26k/mo with Lane Wagner of Boot.dev

We might as well jump into it. We're here with Lane Wagner. What's up, Lane? Hey. How's it going? Doing great. Yeah. Same here. You are the founder of boot.dev, where basically anybody can go to learn back end development, what you call the addictive way. So you've got over 34,000 students who've basically signed up to start learning modern back end development skills like Python and Go. And it takes, what, six months, you said, just working on this part time to get to the point where people have completed your coursework, and they are now at what level of back end developer? Entry level. Six months is the aggressive estimate. Right? That's the marketing. Yeah. Exactly. It's the marketing. They're only for the real addicts. The yeah. The ones that are spending twenty hours a week, you know, really grinding at it. And that's kind of one of the ways that I think we differentiate in the space. Like, so many people are marketing, like, you know, twelve weeks, six weeks, like crazy. You know, we'll get you through this, this program really quickly. I think it takes a little longer. I I have a blog post that that is, like, linked, you know, at the, with the asterisk on the six months. Yeah. We're looking at six months. We're looking at twelve months. Yeah. It's going to take longer. You have to work hard. I saw that you had a post on Indie Hackers. I think it was in July 2020 where correct me if I'm wrong correct me if I'm wrong. Was it Qvault classroom? You're like, hey. I'm how I'm launching your product in an overcrowded industry. And it was called Qvault classroom. I wasn't even sure if this is the same product, but based on, like, your description, it sounds like it. You've renamed it the boot.dad. You dredged up the horrors that were the old product. Yeah. And it struggled for a long time as I'm sure many indie hackers have this story. Right? Yeah. Launched it as qvaultclassroom, and the reason for naming it qvault is awful. It's just because I owned the domain name. I didn't wanna buy another one. So it was qvaultclassroom. That was July 2020 right in the beginning of the pandemic. And now the new better named boot.dev is what I saw is that it's up to 26,000 in in revenue a month. Is that still accurate? Yeah. We did 26,000 last month, and we've kind of been on this insane growth curve for the last about eight months. Actually, you could even look back farther than that. When we really started to grow was the very beginning of oh my gosh. It's 2023 already. Yeah. 2022 was when things started to get good. 2020, 2021 were uber rough. We can talk about all those struggles, but it it started to grow in 2020, and the the rebranding was part of that. We rebranded in March 2022, …