ESL teacher to $55k MRR to Successful Exit in 24 months with Danielle Simpson

Danielle Simpson, previously of FeedBackPanda tells Geordie how her quest to ease task execution led her into building a robust SaaS platform.

Danielle is a teacher, co-founder of FeedBackPanda, and a certified meditation and Yoga instructor. During her stint in the teaching industry, she realized that teachers needed a tool to help them remain focused on student success and reduce burnout. Listen to Danielle as she shares her journey with Geordie. 

What You’ll Learn

• How Danielle ventured into teaching English as a second language
• What was Danielle’s original solution for easing the feedback generation process for her students?
• What was FeedBackPanda doing in the beginning? 
• When and how did Danielle realize that an automated solution could be effective?
• How long did it take Danielle and her co-founder to build the prototype?
• How Danielle and her partner rolled out the solution to potential customers
• Why you should determine where your potential customers hang out
• What made FeedBackPanda unique?
• What channel did Danielle and her team use to grow?
• How Daniella’s product moved from 0-55,000
• What inbound strategy did Daniella and her team use to boost the product?
  
  

In this Episode

Teaching English as a second language can be a difficult task and this was the case with Danielle. Being part of the teaching team helped her identify the problems that she and her colleagues were facing. She would later pitch her idea to her boyfriend, a software engineer, and together they came up with the FeedBackPanda idea. Danielle gives Geordie brief details about her background. 

Danielle explains the events that pushed her into inventing the FeedBackPanda idea. She says she taught in one-on-one classes, and after each class, they had to submit a short report about each lesson. Seeing that all she did was gig work, there were no guaranteed bookings, and she had to handle all her marketing tasks.

It was too much work, and Danielle wanted a solution that could help her develop her career, improve her ratings, and save time. Listen to the podcast to understand how difficult Danielle’s tasks were before she finally came up with the solution. She says that generating feedback was taking up lots of her time, and she had to do something about it. Find out what she did to counter this challenge. 

While there were competitors already, Danielle and her co-founder worked hard to ensure that their platform was unique to attract more bookings. At some point, Geordie gives a practical example of the importance of reviews, and you cannot afford this, especially if you are an entrepreneur.

Danielle says she wanted to determine whether the system would work before selling it to other teachers. According to Danielle, many of her colleagues in the marketing industry were not ready to be entrepreneurs. Together with her co-founder, they used that as a marketing strategy to show the teachers that they were already entrepreneurs. She sought to demonstrate to the teachers the importance of having proper tools that could ease their job. Danielle gives a detailed explanation of the marketing strategy they used. Listen to the podcast to find out.

When the product was finally ready for roll-out, Danielle set out to find potential customers. Find out how a question posted on a Facebook group presented her with an opportunity to introduce her product to the group members. Did anybody sign up for the product from that post? Find out from the podcast. Danielle says that even after three months of creating the product, she was not convinced that it was ready. She also felt that they needed to let potential customers use the product first and get feedback before finally launching it in the market.

When Danielle finally made the product available to teachers, she received numerous ideas on how to improve it and even make it community-based. Listen to the podcast to figure out some other excellent ideas that the teachers had. Danielle also talks about a template database system and how it worked. When Danielle launched her product, there were numerous companies they could have chosen to integrate with.

However, they opted to work with companies that wanted to work with American teachers. She explains this strategy in-depth, and you can get all the details from the podcast. Danielle narrates her 0-55,000 MRR story, which you should listen to. While FeedBackPanda was thriving, Danielle sold it. She explains why in this podcast. Danielle admits that while she went through a moment of loss after selling the business, she does not regret her decision. 

Resources

Danielle Simpson Twitter

Danielle Simpson LinkedIn

FeedBackPanda

Danielle Simpson Website

Arvid Kahl

Zero to Sold