27 founder stories
A DocuPanda cofounder set out to prove you can build a small SaaS that takes real money in under 24 hours, and walked through doing exactly that with a PDF redaction tool.
Nico Jeannen built TalkNotes after a bad experience with Google Docs transcription, soft-launched it on Twitter, hit number one on Product Hunt, and sold it for $200,000 about a year later.
After a decade making content, Thomas Frank made $1 million in a single year selling Notion templates, with the line peaking at $100k a month.
Ali Salah built Instatus, a service for creating status pages. Reaching $1K MRR was his goal for 2020. Product-Market Fit Initially offered a fr...
In 2023, Iuliia built 10 products. Her partner Marc launched Papermark - a simple open-source DocSend alternative. The first version took one weekend....
When running a previous business, Elie spent way too much time on email. He thought, 'Why can't an AI do this for me?' First Mover Elie was a fi...
Luca documented his solopreneur journey publicly on Twitter, reaching $1.5K MRR in his first year while working a day job.
Julien built NotionForms to solve his own problem, reaching $10K MRR in 12 months through Product Hunt and SEO.
Peer Richelsen launched Calendso as an open-source Calendly alternative, attracted 20K+ GitHub stars, rebranded to Cal.com, and raised $32M.
Maciej Cupial from Poland had a background as a programmer and entrepreneur. After a challenging 2.5 years building Calendesk, he finally reached $100...
I'm a 29-year-old software engineer from Germany who left my full-time job to dedicate one year to building my own projects. The Grind My MRR gr...
A self-taught Austrian developer needed a help center for his app, hated every option, and built one on top of Notion instead. HelpKit hit $3K MRR and 130+ customers within roughly a year.
Carrd launched on Product Hunt and made $1K on day one. It grew to $2M ARR with absolutely zero marketing spend. The Launch Product Hunt launch...
Stagetimer started as a weekend project. I posted it on Reddit and it took off. Now doing €20K MRR with 85% profit margin. The Reddit Launch I b...
Shahed Khan and his co-founders pivoted twice before landing on Loom. The async video platform was acquired by Atlassian for $975 million.
Two software engineers built a side project to map compensation levels across tech companies. Word spread on Blind and HN. Now Levels.fyi dominates tech compensation data.
Dan Shipper grew Every from a paid newsletter into four in-house AI products doing about $1.2M ARR, using the audience he built as the launch channel for everything that followed.
Built to solve his own problem with Notion navigation, Gourav kept Notion Boost open-source while still earning $9K+ through premium features.
Tiago Forte developed his note-taking system to cope with a debilitating voice disorder. That personal system became Building a Second Brain, the world's most popular personal knowledge management course.
Andrew Fennell knew nothing about SEO when he launched StandOut CV. A decade of slow, compounding content and careful link building took the CV builder past 23,000 paying customers and £40K MRR with no paid ads.
James Ivings and Danielle Johnson launched a one-click email unsubscribe tool on Product Hunt in 2019, then grew it to around $10k MRR while publishing every metric on a public open-startup page.
After 24 years in SaaS, I built GMass to $8.6M ARR with just $10K initial investment and 11 employees. Bootstrap Forever I've been bootstrapping...
Amir Salihefendic built Todoist as a side project to manage his own tasks as a student. 17 years later it's a fully bootstrapped, $20M+ ARR company used by 30 million people.
Jan Oberhauser, a VFX pipeline engineer, started coding n8n in his Berlin apartment after work. His first hire was a developer evangelist. Now it's worth $2.5B with 150K GitHub stars.
We rebuilt Notion 4 times before it worked. At one point, we moved to Japan to rewrite the entire tech stack. Now we're at $567M ARR with 30M+ users....
A team from Prague spent 4 years building before they launched publicly. Zero VC funding. $10M revenue. Acquired by Celonis for $107M.
Sam Liang built the "blue dot" at Google Maps, then founded Otter.ai to solve his own meeting problem. A Zoom partnership, free tier that undercut $1/minute competitors, and journalist evangelists drove 35M users.