business

My 2025 Black Friday Sale (Work) Starts… Now

August 29, 2025

Every year, I run a Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com on SQL Server training and apps. It’s a genuinely big deal for me, almost half of our annual revenue. We brought in $885K last year (up from $847K in 2023, although down from well over $1M during the pandemic.) In addition, this is a release year for Microsoft, which means customers will be looking for training on the new version, SQL Server 2025. To prep for that, I have to think about: What my deals will be for this year – because I need to walk the line between cheap (which…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 12

April 2, 2024

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. When we left off in the Year 11 post, I had gone through a ton of dramatic changes: divorce, moving to the US then to Mexico then to Vegas, and started grinding through my last year of live training classes, aiming to finish in October 2022. This post covers year 12 of the company, and I’m actually gonna stretch the dates out a little: May 2022 to December…

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Wow, People Didn’t Buy Live Mastering Classes.

December 1, 2023

business

My annual Black Friday sale over at BrentOzar.com just finished. Every year, I try different experiments with it – changing bundles, adding lifetime memberships, adding buy-now-pay-later, etc. One of this year’s experiments was to add live classes back into the mix. When I launched them in October, I explained that the time had come to update the material for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL DB, and as long as I had to record them myself to update the material, I might as well teach the classes live. I didn’t offer a Live Class Season Pass as I have in…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 11: Massive Changes

April 4, 2023

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, Stack Overflow

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 11 of the company: May 2021 to April 2022. Normally I do a blog post that weaves a few things together into a story, but this year, let’s just dump the rollercoaster into a bullet point list: June: Stack Overflow got acquired, and Erika and I had a financial windfall thanks to Jeff & Joel’s very generous stock option grants. We almost built a house…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 10: Isolation and Adaptation

April 12, 2022

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, PollGab

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 10 of the company: May 2020 to April 2021. Boy, did that year suck or what? What a rollercoaster. COVID raged, we weren’t supposed to wear masks, then we were, then we got vaccines, then a lot of people did their own research, then the Delta variant hit. During Year 10, a lot of good things happened to me while a lot of bad…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 9

March 9, 2021

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 9 of the company: May 2019 to April 2020. As a quick reminder, COVID-19 reared its ugly head late in year 9. I started year 9 with a new toy. In year 8, I made tough decisions and worked my ass off to secure the future of the company. I’d laid off the consulting employees, then worked a lot of weekends and late nights to build up a financial safety…

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Building the BrentOzar.com 2020 Black Friday Sale

November 13, 2020

black friday, business, marketing

Seven years ago, I ran the first Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com just for fun. I always like shopping for stuff like TVs around this time of year, even if I don’t actually buy anything – it’s just a fun diversion for looking. However, it caught on with consumers in a big way, so over the years, it became a really big deal for the business. In 2018, we crossed the half-million dollar mark, and then things got better in 2019 as well. Every year, leading up to the sale, I put a lot of thought into two things: What…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 8

April 7, 2020

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 8 of the company: May 2018 to April 2019. Erika and I moved to San Diego. San Diego home office We’d lived in Chicago for years, but I was tired of the winters. Ever since my first trip to California, I’d felt like I belonged there. It took years to make the financial numbers and personal timeline make sense, but we finally pulled it off in August 2018. I loved…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 7

April 9, 2019

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 7 of the company – April 2017 to April 2018. This year was about making financial sacrifices. One way (certainly not the only one) to build an app is to work through these phases: Start by solving a pain manually with hourly rate consulting Gradually turn it into a productized service: a standard, fixed-rate consulting package Build tools so you can deliver the finished product faster (thereby increasing your profit),…

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Gumroad vs WooCommerce review comparison

Gumroad vs WooCommerce: Comparison Review

February 5, 2019

business, , gumroad, woocommerce, wordpress

I’ve used WooCommerce for years to sell training and online services, but I recently started using Gumroad. Here’s a quick comparison: The short story: Gumroad is for people who want to sell stuff right away, easily. WooCommerce is for people who want more power and control, and are willing to spend a lot of time managing their store. Now for the longer story, starting with my background. I’m a data professional: I help companies make their Microsoft SQL Server databases faster and more reliable. In my work, I sell training videos, live webcasts, and online service subscriptions at BrentOzar.com. I…

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business

Hi. I’m Brent.