How I Went From $9/hr To Selling A Company For 7 Figures (Part 1)
Tags: saas, startup, laravel, vue
Published: 2022-09-28 19:42:07

I'm a college dropout who taught myself to code from websites like Team Treehouse and CodeAcademy. Last year I sold my SAAS startup for 7 figures after running it for just under 4 years.

This post is about how it all started with learning to code!

In 2013 I was laid off from my $9/hr job and had a few months of severance pay to hold me over. I had felt really unfulfilled and underutilized in a clerical job, so I was excited to have a few months to figure something new out.

The day I got laid off my uncle asked me to help him put up a website (he had a local service business) and I really enjoyed the challenge. I put up a basic Wordpress website, wrote and SEO optimized a few pages, and was happy to see that it directly led to more business and phone calls for him within just a few weeks.

I discovered a coding course while googling to learn how to make my uncle's logo bigger :D

The big thing that really lit me up was a wonderful course from Team Treehouse on How to Build Your First Website, through which I was able to very quickly build a beautiful website from an existing design completely on my own.

It's hard to describe how it felt to see such great results in such a short amount of time.

I had taken a college course on computer programming many years prior, but had almost failed the course. Some of the more abstract coding work was too much for my feeble brain... but here was something that I really enjoyed.

Around the same time I discovered a website called Elance (now called UpWork) and was thrilled to see that people were getting paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to do what I had just done for my uncle for free.

I started applying for jobs and quickly got my first job to build 7 custom WordPress themes for $777. If I saw that job listing now I would think someone was crazy for getting paid that little, but apparently the job description was just reasonable enough for me to apply and I wasn't afraid to "pay for my education".

I kept picking up freelance work and doing local web design jobs for about a year and a half before deciding I might need to look for a JOB. Freelancing was a great learning experience but I wasn't a great marketer and was barely scraping by. Tax season was around the corner and I hadn't been able to save anything so I was going to be in trouble...

So instead of looking for fixed price gigs, I started looking for hourly work through the same marketplace as well as some other places online.

I could have looked at jobs locally, but to be honest I didn't know what job titles I would be qualified for...

After about a month and a half I saw a job listing that was perfect for my skillset - though maybe a bit of a stretch. I applied and got an interview over Skype the next day.

On our call the business owner asked me a few questions about my skills and abilities, then said "You're hired! How's $35/hr?"

I was pretty shell shocked since that was almost 4 times my last hourly rate ($9/hr) which I was at for 4 years, but I started work the next Monday and my salary just increased from there along with my skills!

Eventually those same skills allowed me to make 6 figures doing something I really enjoy, build my own SAAS product which sold for 7 figures and make money teaching other people to do the same.

So... that's my story. What do ya think? Ask me a question!