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🚀 Case Study: The Solopreneur Who Built $55K/Month in 2 Years — Then Sold at the Peak
How Arvid Kahl Turned a Tiny Teacher Tool Into a $55K/Month Business — Then Cashed Out
Sahil Khan
August 06, 2025
By: Solo Business brief
Published in: Solo Business Brief
💡 The $55K/Month SaaS Nobody Saw Coming
📍 Arvid Kahl is an online English teacher.
He’s broke, exhausted, and stuck writing hours of repetitive feedback after every class.
Thousands of teachers are in the same boat.
But instead of complaining… Arvid built the boat everyone wanted to be on.
🔥 The Spark
No investor pitch.
No Silicon Valley hype.
Just a problem he personally lived — and knew others would pay to solve.
“If we could make feedback writing instant and shareable, teachers would never go back.”
Arvid partnered with Danielle Simpson, a fellow teacher, and started building.
🛠 The Build
💻 No team: Arvid coded the MVP himself.
💬 Customer-first: Danielle embedded in teacher Facebook groups, listening before pitching.
🗣 Real-time feedback: Every complaint became a feature request — and was shipped fast.
📈 The Growth Engine
The genius wasn’t a marketing campaign.
It was a built-in growth loop inside the product:
✨ One-click template sharing → teachers shared feedback templates with colleagues → colleagues became customers → repeat.
No ads.
No SEO campaigns.
Just users doing the marketing for them.
⚙ Automate or Die
Running a $55K/month SaaS with two people sounds impossible — unless most of it runs itself:
✅ Onboarding — automated
✅ Billing — automated
✅ Template syncing — automated
✅ Support — templated with personal touches
Automation gave them freedom while growing.
💰 The Numbers
📅 Metric | 📊 Result |
|---|---|
Launch Year | 2017 |
Team Size | 2 |
MRR in 24 Months | $55,000 |
Marketing Spend | $0 |
Acquisition | 7‑figure exit to SureSwift Capital |
💼 Why They Sold
Most founders hold on forever. Arvid didn’t.
They sold while:
📈 Growth was strong
⚔ Competition was rising
🧘 Freedom mattered more than scale
Exiting at the peak locked in wealth and lifestyle.
🌱 Life After SaaS
Arvid didn’t build another stressful startup.
He built a calm business empire:
📖 Zero to Sold — a bestselling roadmap for founders.
📕 The Embedded Entrepreneur — audience-first building.
🛠 PermanentLink — micro-SaaS for authors.
📰 The Bootstrapped Founder Newsletter — teaching thousands of solopreneurs weekly.
🎥 YouTube Channel — candid founder advice & Q&A.
📜 Arvid’s 5 Rules for Solopreneur Wealth
1️⃣ Find the people before the product — live in their world until their problems feel like yours.
2️⃣ Make it recommendable — if users don’t share it, you’ll pay for every new customer.
3️⃣ Automate early — buy back your time before you even need it.
4️⃣ Exit at strength — sell when you don’t have to.
5️⃣ Leverage your story — post-exit, your journey is your next business.
💭 Question for you: If you were making $55K/month solo… would you scale, or would you sell?
📩 More stories like this at Solo Business Brief — where founders learn from the ones who built freedom, not just fortune.