Zero to Sold

How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business

De: Arvid Kahl

Narrado por: Derek Botten

Zero to Sold is a comprehensive and actionable guide through the four stages of a bootstrapped business: Preparation, Survival, Stability, and Growth.

From your first idea to successfully selling your business for life-changing amounts of money, this book will help you become a world-class entrepreneur. By focusing on your niche audience, finding their critical problem, and solving it with a product that your customers can't resist to pay for, you will learn how to create a recurring revenue engine that will make you financially independent.

It's easy to build software products. The hard part is turning them into viable businesses that stand the test of time. If you want to build a business that survives, you have to know what challenges you will encounter. Zero to Sold tells the story of a sustainable, bootstrapped software business that grew to thousands of customers before it was acquired.

Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur who has accomplished just that. He co-founded and grew an online teacher productivity SaaS business called FeedbackPanda to $55,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, just two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on The Bootstrapped Founder blog.

In Zero to Sold, Arvid shares his experiences, learnings, and insights from building a Software-as-a-Service business from start to finish. He shows what worked and what didn't work. If you want to build your own bootstrapped business and stay sane while doing it, Zero to Sold will be your guide.

You will learn how to:

• explore and validat

©2020 Arvid Kahl (P)2020 Arvid Kahl

Indpirative

Amazing story about how you can build a profitable business from nothing without external investment.

Appreciated the Author's Personal Experience

Great walkthrough of the process of building and selling a bootstrapped internet business. Arvid's personal experience makes the book much more authoritative and interesting.

Useful, concise, actionable--it's a good read.

This book is useful concise an actionable if you're interested in founding a SaaS business. It goes one layer deeper then I had expected on most topics, which was a pleasant surprise, and had more breath than expected as well.

I found it will worth the time and would recommend it.

Helpful and thorough

This is a good assessment of the bootstrapped journey. I appreciated his deep dives into some of the programming best practices. Thought it was helpful overall.

Seemingly written and read by ChatGPT

I’ve listened to a lot of these lately for some new ideas and inspiration, and I’m actually a little mad about this one. Bland, regurgitated content read by the most generic voice you can imagine. S-A-A-S! So, so much time hammering on finding a niche, I had to fast forward life I was watching one of the drawn out Netflix series that should’ve been a single episode. Really feels like a ripoff.

Mere research padded with largely useless content

The description and reviews of the book made it highly promising; but this ended up disappointing me. I wouldn't say that the book in itself is bad, but the combination of its description, introduction's premises, and actual content results in remarkably poor material.

The author sets out to guide entrepreneurs growing bootstrapped businesses from his experience building his SaaS application. He writes a litany of "do this" and "don't do this" on the "crucial" selection of a niche, the steps from finding one's audience to crafting a product and everything in-between.

This is all good, except that he wants to refer to his experience building his product as an illustration while the large majority of his dos and donts do not apply to his experience. He'd make you think that you have to be laser-focused in the selection of your niche whereas his niche "happened". He'd have you believe that you have to learn and carefully do your market research, including talking to your customer, consulting with industry experts, etc., while his own business started with a simple realization of an opportunity.
Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to be opportunistic in business; I'm saying that it's a little disingenuous for an author to invoke experience that doesn't back the "guidelines" he's giving. We can all admire the evidently deep research that has gone into the book preparation, but please don't claim to be using your experience to guide others. This is the very thing that disheartens future entrepreneurs as we're being fed academic literature that does nothing but raise perceived entry barriers.

In other words, I am sure that if this author had read his own book before starting his business, he would have believed that developing his product was doomed and he wouldn't have made it to the first line of code.

Other than that, there's a lot of superfluous content. This is a business book, so the author's experience as a technical person only constitutes one tangential lens. If guidance should be given on technical aspects, then a book on architecture or architecture for SaaS should be given. if it's included in this book, it should at least enable the reader on critical characteristics of technical choices affecting the bottom line, rather than some random common sense, best practices ideas that belong in tech blog posts.

Narrator isn't bad, but the audio quality is unstable, one would think that the bit rate significantly goes down at times.

Something about this disappointment overcame my normal reluctance to leave negative reviews. I'm even unable to finish the book.