Zero to Sold is a comprehensive and actionable guide through the four stages of a bootstrapped business: Preparation, Survival, Stability, and Growth.
This is a book by me, Arvid Kahl. I am a software engineer turned entrepreneur turned writer. It’s a book about what I learned in over a decade, culminating in the successful sale of FeedbackPanda, an EdTech Software-as-a-Service business that I founded with my partner Danielle Simpson.
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.
Zero to Sold teaches you how to:
- Explore and validate your idea before you jump into building a prototype that no one needs.
- Find a well-defined audience, locate their critical problem, envision a solution that fits into their workflow, and build a product that makes them want to pay. Then, build a repeatable process of selling your product: a business.
- Grow your business sustainably and make it sellable, even if you want to keep it forever. Or sell it for a life-changing amount of money. Either way, you can prepare.
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.
In Zero to Sold, I share my experiences, learnings, and insights from building a Software-as-a-Service business from start to finish. I show 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.
The book is based on 🔗 Zero to Sold, my guide and compendium that is and will forever be available for free on this blog. Please check it out if you want to get a glimpse at the content that will await you in the book. The free guide is by far not as fine-grained as the book and only hints at many concepts that I explore in much more detail in Zero to Sold, the book.
Looking for the Zero to Sold, the web-based compendium? It’s still here.