In episode 608, Rob Walling chats with Adrian Rosebrock, who bootstrapped and successfully exited his seven-figure info product company, PyImageSearch, in 2021. PyImageSearch provided digital courses around visual image detection and image classification in Python.

Adrian wasn’t always an entrepreneur. He graduated with a PhD in computer science, got a day job, realized early on that he hated it, and just stair-stepped his way up to running a successful business. In this episode, we cover a lot including Adrian’s decision to start blogging and launch a Kickstarter campaign in the early days to learning how to hire employees and making the decision to sell the business in 2021.

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[2:41] The story of how Adrian first discovered MicroConf 

[6:29] Why Adrian didn’t want to go down the traditional path after getting his PhD in computer science 

[10:01] When he knew having a traditional day job as an employee wasn’t for him 

[11:24] How he used the stair-step approach to launch PyImageSearch 

[13:54] What Adrian did when he started to see early traction

[16:45] Did having a PhD in computer science have a big impact in the early days of launching his business?  

[18:05] Adrian’s approach to learning how to market

[20:31] How he balanced working a day job and his side business in the early days 

[23:39] Adrian’s launch plan for selling his first ebook in 2014

[28:48] The epiphanies that Adrian had in the early days to keep plugging away 

[33:33] How he went from making $38,000 in 2014 to $600,000 in 2016 as a company of one  

[36:28] The mindset shifts he had to make when he started hiring employees

[39:10] Adrian’s decision to sell the business 

[45:03] His reflections after selling the business in 2021

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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