32 Gründer-Stories
We started Pocketed during the pandemic to help startups find grants and funding they didn't know existed. The Idea During COVID, there was sudd...
TransferWise went live on 24 January 2011 with a flat one pound fee and one TechCrunch post. Seven days later the founders reported customers moving money between eight countries.
Crystal Harrison spent almost 25 years watching freelancers get blindsided by tax bills. She used an AI dev tool to build SnapTax in evenings and weekends, and reached her first 3 paying customers eight weeks after launch.
Kyle Konstnar stopped waiting for SEO and landing-page tweaks, went directly to spas, salons, and service businesses, and turned HandyPay into a $1K MRR payments tool in under 60 days.
Deel's first product had no buyers. A pivot ten days before Y Combinator's demo day put 290 contractors and $5,000 a month on the board.
These 22-year-old Brazilian founders pivoted from VR in Y Combinator to build Brex, solving their own pain of not getting a corporate credit card despite having funding.
Immad Akhund left Google and sold his first startup for $45M before building Mercury, the go-to banking platform for startups valued at $3.5B.
Ben Waterman left a finance job to build a personal finance dashboard with no coding background, starting in Bubble and reaching $1K MRR with 1,100 monthly active users.
Monzo shipped a loss making prepaid card as a stand-in for a bank account, put the first 500 into customers' hands 271 days after founding, and reached a million customers in September 2018 with no meaningful ad spend.
Angus Cheng spent thousands on Google Ads and barely broke even selling PDF conversion credits. Switching to subscriptions and writing blog posts got Bank Statement Converter to $1K MRR in ten months, then past $7K with ads switched off.
Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai spent a year failing before a handful of sneaker resellers told them exactly what to build and what they would pay. Eleven months after that pivot, Slash was at $5 million in ARR.
After two successful exits to Oracle and Dropbox, these MIT friends built Pilot into the largest startup-focused bookkeeping firm by doing all the bookkeeping themselves first.
Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi started working together at 16 and built Brex to $12B valuation.
Sumit Kumar built a portfolio tracker to scratch his own itch, then kept it deliberately narrow: one country, one language, one currency. That focus took Parqet to €15k MRR in its first year.
After a COVID layoff, Ilya Novohatskyi built Microns on nights and weekends as a micro-startup acquisition marketplace, using no-code tools, Twitter and Product Hunt to reach $1K MRR in one year.
Andrew Gazdecki seeded a two sided marketplace with cold calls and cold emails, hit $200,000 in ARR exactly one year after launching on Product Hunt, and reported his first profitable year in 2025.
Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis quit their jobs in 2019 to build a better spreadsheet. Users called it cool and left. The first paying customer only arrived in early 2021, after they booked 40 demos in a single month and ran a free pilot.
Jen quit her job at Twitter, traveled the world, and built Lunch Money as a company of one to 1000+ paying users.
Jon Bittner pivoted from astrophysics to building Splitwise, now used by tens of millions worldwide.
Andres Ugarte started building Copilot Money in 2018, creating a native iOS finance app that became an Apple Design Award finalist.
Codie Sanchez went from Goldman Sachs to building Contrarian Thinking — a newsletter that hit 10K subscribers in 30 days. She parlayed that audience into courses, community, and a holding company that now does 9 figures in revenue.
Patrick Campbell cashed out his 401k in 2012, wrote an ebook about SaaS pricing and turned free pricing audits into the first 20 customers of Price Intelligently. He sold the company, by then ProfitWell, to Paddle for over $200 million.
Truebill spent two years as a free app whose founders assumed nobody would pay a subscription to cancel subscriptions. The premium tier they shipped as a last resort converted at 3.5 times what Yahya Mokhtarzada expected.
Kyle built ProjectionLab because he wanted a better plan for his own financial future. There were 0 paid users when he posted to Hacker News. Hacke...
Matt Paulson built a daily stock ratings email to keep an ad network happy. The paid version sold 12 subscriptions its first weekend and became MarketBeat.
Max Schmitt has built Cakedesk, a one-time-purchase invoicing app, as a side project since late 2021. In its fourth year it sold 239 new licenses, up from about 170 the year before.
Kirk Simpson built Wave from a free accounting tool to a $400M acquisition by H&R Block, surviving being 10 days from bankruptcy along the way.
Mike McDerment accidentally saved over an invoice and built FreshBooks to solve his own pain, bootstrapping for 3.5 years from his parents basement to reach $50M+ in annual revenue.
Shalom Stark bootstrapped Invoice Ninja to 200,000+ users through open source, SEO, and word of mouth - without spending on marketing.
Tim Chen invested $800 to build NerdWallet, a credit card comparison site. Obsessive SEO grew it to 20M+ monthly visitors, $500M+ revenue, and an IPO in 2021.
Jesse Mecham built a simple spreadsheet to manage money with his wife. That spreadsheet became YNAB, now used by millions worldwide.
Nick Huber started Storage Squad at Cornell, expanded to 25 college towns, then caught the self-storage bug. He used Twitter to raise $20M+ and scale to 63+ properties worth $150M+, while building Sweaty Startup into a media brand.