How did Arvid Kahl go from SaaS Struggles to a Million-Dollar Exit and Twitter Stardom?

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From bootstrapping a company to $55k MRR to reaching 100k Twitter followers, Arvid Kahl has done it all. He has become popular in the fields of entrepreneurship, audience development, and literature. In this piece, we'll look at Arvid Kahl's journey and some of the ideas and approaches he utilised along the way.

Learning From Failed Businesses

Arvid gained experience as a software engineer by working for different SaaS and working as a contractor towards the start of his career. While working for multiple companies Arvid often used to moonlight and was involved in the development of various firms with friends. But most of them failed due to a lack of business skills and uncontrollable factors at other times.

Despite all the failed businesses over the years, Arvid never stopped trying to build businesses and instead took lessons from them which has helped him achieve success down the line.

For instance, back in 2013, He along with a small team in Berlin came up with a cool idea: they wanted to create a marketplace where people could easily get fresh organic food from nearby farms without having to travel far. They had a neat plan to connect farmers with city folks. But as they started building the platform, they faced some problems. They failed due to several reasons but Arvid learned many lessons from the mistakes they made.

• Arvid believes that they made a huge mistake of renting an office and starting to build the platform for 6 months in stealth without validating the idea.

He learned from this that it is never right to build a product without validating it through actual people facing problems. More so, if they are working in stealth. You can find more failure lessons from Arvid’s this failure here. As of now, Arvid builds in public now as you can get better feedback while building in the community.

Feedback Panda

It all began in 2017 when Arvid worked as a software developer, while his partner Danielle taught English to Chinese children as a tutor. Teaching English to non-native speakers posed its challenges. However, the most demanding and laborious aspect was filling out feedback forms for each student, detailing what they had learned during their sessions for their parents.

Danielle resorted to using templates and Excel sheets to handle these tasks, but it proved to be a highly time-consuming process. Given Arvid's background as a software developer, he saw an opportunity to tackle this issue by creating a product that could automate the entire process. This is how they came up with an Idea of Feedback Panda. While there were similar products but all of them were broken in some or the other way. Here is an example of one of their competitors. It says a lot about how broken the industry was.

Feedback Panda essentially provides templates for teachers to submit feedback, eliminating the need to write feedback from scratch for each student. It serves as an all-in-one system that efficiently manages courses, student details, and feedback records, while also introducing cloud-based template sharing, enabling teachers to share their templates with one another. According to them, utilizing these predefined templates could save approximately 120 minutes for each user, making the feedback process more streamlined and time-efficient.

Since Arvid was already a software developer and had experience developing these types of software, he quickly developed an MVP within a week and after refining the product for a month or so, they decided to start acquiring their initial customers.

Initially, all of their customers were organic and most of them came through word of mouth. In fact, customers wanted to pay for the product even before Arvid could set up stripe integration for their code in production.

They marketed their product heavily through 3 main channels.

1 - Facebook Groups

They relied on Facebook groups to get initial traction. They were hyperactive on Facebook and would simply engage with people who were facing similar problems.

This strategy worked well and helped them in expanding their reach and gaining customers through word-of-mouth.

Here is a funny marketing meme from their Facebook page. That they used for marketing.

2 - Referrals

They had a referral system where teachers would get a commission on referring someone and the referee would get a discount. It was a win-win-win situation for all of them.

3 - Interviews

Each week they conducted teacher interviews and shared those stories with their audience. This contributed to fostering a sense of positivity within the community.

Here is a link to one of the teacher interviews they posted on their Facebook. (Link)

A sellable product, outstanding support, and good marketing helped them a lot. The business was growing rapidly. By 2019 they had more than 5000 users and did more than $50,000 in MRR.

Their graph was increasing linearly however they decided to sell the whole business to SureSwift Capital in 2019. The reasons behind selling the business were multifold.

1. Diversifying Wealth: One primary reason behind the sale was the desire to diversify their financial assets. This way, they could reduce risk and invest in other opportunities.

2. Building a Relationship with the Acquirer: The process of selling the business involved establishing a positive relationship with SureSwift Capital. This cooperation assured them that the acquisition would be a win-win situation for all of them.

3. Avoiding Burnout: Arvid, revealed that he was on the brink of burnout. The business's substantial revenue and large customer base required significant effort to manage single-handedly. By selling the business, he could alleviate the immense pressure and find a better work-life balance.

In October 2019, they sold their company and Arvid chose to become a creator, sharing his valuable lessons with others on a similar journey.

Journey as a creator

Post-selling Feedback Panda, Arvid did not have anything to do. He was going through a phase of burnout. He mentions that during the times before selling Feedback Panda since they did not hire anyone to do any job, his heart rate would pump up to 90-120. He was naturally suffering a burnout so he took some time off and then started off his journey as a creator. He decided he would run a newsletter, a podcast, and his Twitter account.

Over the period of 4 years since his exit from feedback panda, he has achieved a massive feat in his journey as a creator too, he went from about 400 followers in November 2019 to having 118k followers on Twitter right now.

The single and most important growth driver from his journey as a creator is being super consistent. He has shown up for everything since the past 4 years, which has been the number one reason why he is able to live successfully as a creator.

While on this journey he has recorded 235 podcast episodes and wrote 180+ newsletter issues. His podcast has recently crossed 200k downloads and the newsletter has grown to 20,000 subscribers. This alone is testament to his super consistency. Good things indeed take time, but requires serious efforts.

Also, he has written books Zero to Sold, The Embedded Entrepreneur and created a twitter course. Both his books and Twitter course are mega successes. Here is a tweet from him giving out book revenue in public:

Arvid Kahl says in one of the podcasts that the success of the book 'Zero to Sold' can be attributed to his own effective implementation of the very techniques and strategies outlined within the book’s pages. So rather than discussing how he made all his books and course successful. We will discuss a few of the most important lessons by Arvid Kahl and answer a few questions that can help founders to build a successful bootstrapped business.

How to actually find an idea?

Arvid talks about his approach to starting a business and identifying a niche market. Rather than attempting to create an entirely new market, he suggests locating an existing market and improving it for a specific group of people. Entrepreneurs can create products that address problems by validating ideas within existing communities. Here is an image from one of his books:

Document and Automate everything from Day 0

Arvid believes in automating and documenting the work that they do. While it might not help immediately, in the future it can save a considerable amount of time.

They documented everything from coding to business practices, to handling customer complaints. Arvid had even recorded an 11-hour video of him explaining the code base so that new developers can easily follow along and speed up the process.

In one of his podcasts, Arvid mentions that it just took them a single day to hand over the entire company when they decided to sell all because of the documentation and automation that they had.

How to actually go from 0 to 1k MRR?

The answer to this question lies in how he actually did it for Feedback Panda. During his 30-day Feedback Panda trial, he took a customer-centric approach, engaging with each individual customer diligently. He took pride in responding to customer inquiries sometimes in mere 15 seconds, ensuring that their needs were met as soon as possible. Sometimes when developing software was required he would ship it in 3-4 hours and get back to the customer. This helped them develop deep relations in the initial stages.

Notably, his partner was also an active member of the community. They took the time to talk with every member of the Facebook group, generously offering help and finding answers for everyone, regardless of their purchasing intentions. So in the heart, the first users beta as well as paid are the most important users that can shape the product in the right direction.

There are so many lessons to be learned from Arvid's journey that we couldn't include them all in this newsletter. To get the most out of his books, we recommend purchasing them. We are going to listen to his entire audiobook on Amazon audible as soon as possible to get all the juice out of this so it could help us grow our newsletter.

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 22 hours of effort. If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link with them. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave a comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this blog post.