Making $10,000 Monthly Helping Developers With Tools To Build
How an agency can transformed into an educational platform & community
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hey there! I'm Tony Lea, a family man and web developer who loves to hack on fun projects.
I'm the creator of DevDojo, a platform and community that provides developers with tools to build sites and apps.
DevDojo began 10 years ago and started off as a small agency. Over time the agency website transformed into an educational site where I would create videos and tutorials for developers.
Over the last 3-4 years, myself as well as my cofounder Bobby have built tools and resources for developers to make it what it is today. It has been an exciting adventure where we are still learning and discovering new things as we grow.
We also have a few popular Open source projects including Voyager, Wave, and most recently Genesis.
When I'm not digging into new projects and brainstorming fun ideas, you'll usually find me hanging out with my Family at DisneyWorld or Sporting Events.
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How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
It's been a journey getting to where I'm at today, but a fun one, none-the-less. I've had many jobs on my way to becoming a developer, but I've always been into computers.
I've worked as a bottle boy at a local Market, McDonalds for 2-weeks (hated every minute of it), and finally I had a got a decent gig where I worked customer service for Adobe.
This was back around 1999 and where my interest in computers really started to excel. I eventually went to school for Software Engineering at OregonTech.
After graduating I moved to SanDiego and worked with many companies as a beginner Engineer. After a few years I started doing some freelancing and a few years later DevDojo was Born. I had always been intrigued and loved visiting developer sites that helped me build my own app.
That inspired me to build DevDojo and grow it to eventually be a hub for developer videos and tutorials. The first product on DevDojo was unlocking Premium Videos and Tutorials. It was and still is a subscription service. Eventually I started building products like Tails, Wave, Pines and more.
I guess you could say I wanted to build an Adobe type of business, but specific for Developer Tools. The only cost to create the first iterations of DevDojo was the cost of time (and hosting services of course). It's been a windy road with many twists and turns, but it's worth every bit of effort. I feel extremely lucky that I get to work on fun projects and things that I really enjoy.
How did you get your first initial customers?
After DevDojo become a "product" website and no longer an "agency" website, it took me about 3 years to aquire my first 50 customers.
But even at that point I wasn't focused on getting more customers, but rather adding more content and building up my SEO. I figured it was best to build an audience and maximize my reach before I built something I wanted to sell.
The day I reached my 100th customer marked a significant milestone in this journey. The excitement was so overwhelming that I couldn't resist sharing my joy with the world, as evidenced by this tweet:
We are currently sitting at about 650 paid customers and we are currently sitting at about 85,000 registered users in the community.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
Our main marketing channel for DevDojo is SEO.
We currently get around 130,000 visitors to our website every month from SEO and it seems to be working pretty well.
We are also active on Twitter (X) and do some "Build in Public" self promotions from our personal accounts.
How does your business make money?
We currently have a subscription model to access premium content as well as gain access to our premium tools.
Here is a breakdown of our current prices:
We may experiment in the future with different price points, but these seem to be working pretty well for us at the moment. We are also working on more Open Source projects that we hope to monetize by offering premium features to DevDojo Pro subscribers.
We are currently making anywhere from $7,000 - $10,000 a month.
There are some months that are higher and months that are lower. We also do some deals during the Holiday season that usually increase the monthly revenue.
We are still learning and trying to grow the business more, so if y'all have any tips on how we can make the product better, be sure to send us a message!
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
Be sure to checkout our website and all our projects!
Thanks for reading!
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