If I Started Now: How to Start a Software Company That Makes $40,000 Per Month

by James Clear

This post is part of the If I Started Now series, which hands you the step–by–step blueprint on how to get started building a particular business.

Let me share a secret with you.

Software is the greatest tool for building a profitable business that the world has ever seen (even if you don’t have any money to get started).

Bold statement, I know.

However, once you’re finished watching today’s interview, I’m confident you’ll feel the same way.

Why Should I Watch This?

Today’s interview is with Dane Maxwell and it will cover the exact steps you need to take to go from nothing (seriously — you don’t even need an idea!) to a profitable software business.

Dane has already built four six–figure software companies and his biggest seller, Paperless Pipeline, currently pulls in over $40,000 per month. Yes, every month.

If you have ever thought about building an iPhone app, web app, or any type of software then this interview is for you.

The goal of this interview is to help you answer the question, “If I started building a software business, what steps should I take right now?”

Don’t miss this one. You’ll love it.

Click the Play Button Below

Mentioned In This Interview

Special Gift — Because Dane is my main man, he has decided to give away a free gift to Passive Panda readers. Click here to find out more.

Spin Selling — Dane mentions this book in the interview (and I promptly pull a copy off my shelf like it was planned all along). You can check it out on Amazon here.

The Foundation — Dane has also taught hundreds of students how to build their own software companies. One student, Sam Ovens, recently went from having no money to building an iPhone app that pulls in over $2,500 per month … and he did this all in 10 weeks. You can get a case study of Sam’s full story here.

What You Should Do Now

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on this interview and on any questions you have about building a software company.

As always, I’ll do my best to help.

10 Reasons To Form A Strategic Business Alliance

Below are 10 good reasons to create a strategic alliance.

1. You could offer your customers a larger variety of products or services. This will allow you to spend less time and money developing new products to sell.

2. Your number of sales people will increase because you are combining with other business. You won’t have to spend time and money hiring new employees.

3. Your marketing and advertising budget will increase. When you form a strategic alliancewith other businesses you both will share the advertising and marketing costs.

4. You can now offer your existing customers more back-end and up-sell products. This will increase your sales and profits.

5. Your business will gain a larger number of skilled people working on the same project. You will gain the knowledge of the other businesses employees.

6. You will be able to beat your competition by selling to a larger target audience. You will also increase the total number of existing customers you can sell your products and services to.

7. You can exchange endorsements with your alliance partners. You’ll add more credibility to your business and gain your potential customers trust to buy.

8. You can expand your business more rapidly. You can develop new products and services faster with a larger work force.

9. You will be able to solve your customer’s problems faster with a larger base of customer service people. You will also learn new ways to improve your customer service from youralliance partners.

10. You will have a larger number of “strategic thinking” people. This will allow both businesses to come up with profitable business ideas quicker than before.

To your successful Business Alliance!

Who Wants To Be The Next Mark Zuckerberg? Everyone, Apparently

• Izzat Jarudi: Startups are far sexier than standard career paths like finance, law, or medicine. In this photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addresses students of Moscow's State University in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

You hear it at companies, universities, government agencies, and nonprofits — everyone, it seems, is working for a “startup” these days. Walk by a mom-and-pop vendor offering free cheese samples in a supermarket and they will tell you their dairy is a startup. At a recent healthcare talk, even noted surgeon and writer Atul Gawande labeled his new cross-disciplinary research center, Ariadne Labs, a startup.

Perhaps the most smitten group is young people. Startups are far sexier than standard career paths like finance, law, or medicine. According to a recent Gallup poll, an astonishing 43 percent of 5th to 12th graders want to be entrepreneurs.

According to a recent Gallup poll, an astonishing 43 percent of 5th to 12th graders want to be entrepreneurs.

It seems easy to explain from an economic perspective. With examples like Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of school and becoming billionaires at age 20-something, what other pursuit promises so much reward, so quickly? It also takes a lot less capital to start a technology company than it did 15 years ago during the dot-com boom — you can develop a consumer website or mobile app with a developer friend, a few laptops with open-source software and an account with Amazon Web Services. If you attract a significant following, venture capitalists might back you with millions to scale up for acquisition or an IPO.

Why slave away in a bank or a law firm for years to make managing director or partner when you can make 10 times the salary or more in a few years tinkering in your parents’ garage? Plus, those traditional careers are no longer as secure as they used to be as a result of the recession.

But there is more to the unprecedented appeal of startups than quick money and low entry costs. Startups offer young people a unique combination of career virtues: potential to have rapid and large-scale impact on society, partnership in a venture that is self-organized and egalitarian, and a set of challenges unlike any other they could encounter in an entry-level job.

Startups — with their organizational blank slates and disruptive business models — can bring about radical change. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have had far more impact on the economy and social behavior than any corporate deal or medical breakthrough a 20 or 30-something could have contributed to in the last 10 years.

Many start-ups also promise, at least in their early stages, to be governed by principles of equality. Founders tend to be a small group of friends or like-minded people who respect each other’s talents and ideas. If you go to many startup websites’ “About” section, such asEtsy or Zappos, you’ll commonly see mission statements reflecting these ideals.

Startups offer potential to have rapid and large-scale impact on society, partnership in a venture that is self-organized and egalitarian, and a set of challenges unlike any other…

Though it may look easy, building a viable business amid fierce competition is relentlessly challenging. In an entry-level job, hierarchy and a division of labor can help prevent an inexperienced 20-something’s actions from hurting an organization. There are no such guarantees in budding startups with 90 percent failure rates. Founders rarely have job descriptions. They often need to juggle everything from sales and marketing to operations, technology and finance for years with little compensation, sporadic feedback, and long hours. Yet young entrepreneurs thrive on this pressure: It lets them engage with a myriad of social and intellectual obstacles and triumph based on a mix of talent, grit, and luck.

That prompts the question: Are young people drawn more to startups than the rest of us or are they simply more capable of enduring the heavy personal and financial costs associated with sustained entrepreneurship? Experienced technology investors like Peter Thiel and Paul Graham tend to take the latter, more pragmatic view. In advising hundreds of startups through his seed accelerator Y Combinator, Graham has observed the cutoff for generating investor excitement to be age 32.

But it’s likely that both views apply: Young people are more willing and able to pursue the startup path. And for those of us above the tender age of 32, the career model of young founders also suggests qualities that we should strive for in our professions, no matter how big or old our organizations are: Find a project at work that is impactful, collaborative, and challenging and you might feel some of the same passion that comes with a team building something new for others.