51 histoires de fondateurs
Carrd started as a side project in 2016. I wanted to create the simplest possible way to build one-page websites. The Concept After years of bui...
Pierre de Wulf and his co-founder Kevin met in high school. After building ShopToList and PricingBot with limited success, they went all-in on Scrapin...
Emanuele Di Pietro turned a midnight challenge to control Codex from iPhone into Remodex, a local-first open-source remote that reached about $10K revenue in its first month.
Erwin had two failed projects before Tailscan. He gave himself a week to build a first demo and showcase it on Twitter. Viral Demo His demo got...
After leaving Product Hunt, I wanted to teach people how to build without code - the skills I had learned myself. The Launch I launched Makerpad...
We built Tailwind CSS as an open source project, then launched Tailwind UI as a commercial product. It made over $500K in the first three days. Bui...
Michele and Mathias Hansen launched Geocodio as a side project in January 2014. A roughly $30 first month covered their small DigitalOcean server bill and proved strangers would pay.
A Rails developer timeboxed an MVP to 30 days, landed two paying customers in his first 20 minutes on Product Hunt, and sold the product 14 months later.
Josh Pigford built Baremetrics in days to scratch his own itch, grew it past $1.5M ARR, walked away from a deal that collapsed at the finish line, then sold a year later for $4 million in cash.
My journey took me from being a Paris waiter to an $80,000/month solopreneur over seven years of persistence. After 17 failed projects, I found succes...
Matthew Miller turned his vibe-coding livestream into BridgeMind, an agentic development ecosystem that reached about $14.8K MRR by day 165 through public building, community and dogfooding instead of paid acquisition.
Mattias Geniar and Freek Van der Herten turned their developer-plus-sysadmin blind spots into Oh Dear, a website monitoring SaaS that reached more than $1.5K per month within its first production months.
After two money-losing years out of Google, Michael Lynch built TinyPilot in his third year as an indie founder, grew it to roughly $1M in annual sales, and sold it for $598,000.
After shipping 15+ iOS apps, Juanjo bundled the boring repeated code into a SwiftUI boilerplate called WrapFast, made $750 on day one, and rode a Black Friday surge to his first $15k month.
Miquel Palet left a venture-backed edtech path, built a focused developer API in a weekend, and used bottom-of-funnel SEO plus paid ads to bootstrap Zernio to $1M ARR in about 10 months.
Welcome to our journey! We launched BugBattle (now Gleap) and reached $10,000 in MRR exactly one year later - much longer than we initially thought....
Guillermo Rauch, a self-taught developer who never finished high school, built Next.js and Vercel. Then he used AI to make his own platform accessible to 100M+ potential users.
Eric Provencher built Repo Prompt as a free AI coding workflow tool, grew a power-user community, then monetized it into 5-figure MRR within a year of the first tester build.
Mohd Danish Yusuf turned his own repeated API-integration pain into NoCodeAPI, grew it to $2K MRR in its launch year, then reached $5K MRR before a six-figure acquisition.
With an IT background but no SaaS experience, Reilly Chase built a UniFi hosting tool, launched it with a single tweet, and found his first 11 paying customers in three weeks by going where Ubiquiti users actually hung out.
JR Farr built Lemon Squeezy as a merchant of record for indie developers, found product-market fit after hiring a sales team, then grew fast when Gumroad raised prices. Stripe acquired it in 2024.
Tim Nolet built Checkly part-time, used a private beta plus open-source Puppeteer Recorder to reach developers, and crossed roughly $1,100 MRR by pairing technical content with early-adopter discounts.
I'm from Brazil and built CSS Scan because I always wanted to know what border-radius, box-shadow, or font-family an element I see has. Fast Progre...
Zeno Rocha spent $25K on a domain, launched an open-source email library, built a 6,338-person waitlist in 7 weeks, then turned it into $5M ARR — the "Stripe of email."
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis bet that website owners would pay for analytics that didn't track visitors. GDPR made privacy a selling point. Result: $100K+ ARR, profitable, bootstrapped — no VC needed.
Katie Keith and her husband ran a WordPress design agency for seven years before betting on plugins. By 2025 Barn2 booked $1.78M in revenue, most of it recurring.
Three friends from Airbnb, Uber, and Coinbase spent a year validating their idea before quitting their jobs to build Linear - now valued at $1.25B.
With 60 days of runway left, David Hsu pivoted from a UK Venmo competitor to Retool - and had a $1.5M pilot signed by Y Combinator Demo Day.
Andris Reinman built EmailEngine from a hard-won IMAP problem, got more than 1,000 GitHub stars before revenue worked, and reached $1K MRR in July 2022.
Aurelio Volle and his co-founder lived on French unemployment support while reinvesting every euro into WP Umbrella, a WordPress maintenance tool that grew to $110K MRR without outside funding.
Christine Yen and Charity Majors didn't just build a product — they created the "observability" category. By writing, speaking, and defining the space, Honeycomb became the category leader. Result: $200M+ in funding, used by Slack, Vanguard, and HelloFresh.
BannerbearWhen I quit my job in January 2019, I had a 2-year runway. For almost 1 year I made no money and burned through my savings. That's because I was doing...
We launched accidentally on Hacker News on 27 May 2020 and the number of databases we hosted jumped ten-fold overnight. The "Open Source Firebase Alte...
Data Fetcher recently hit $10k MRR. It's still 100% bootstrapped with one full-time team member (me!). Background I studied engineering at unive...
Started as scripts to catch domains for myself. Two years later, $125K/month revenue with zero employees.
After Uber sold Jump to Lime and laid off his team, Jake Cooper built Railway to solve the infrastructure headaches he kept running into with every project.
Elston launched Tiiny Host with a simple hypothesis: there are customers who just want a simple tool to quickly host HTML content. SEO Takes Time...
SaaS Pegasus started as a side project while I had a full-time job. It's a Django boilerplate that saves developers weeks of setup time. The Origin...
Uku and Marko built an open source, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. One blog post changed their trajectory.
Adriaan van Rossum came up with the idea for Simple Analytics while on holiday in Tenerife. He wanted to build a privacy-first analytics tool as fast...
I've created 20+ products over the years. Unicorn Platform was the one that really got off the ground. I don't have any KPI or growth goals. I'm not c...
Plausible grew to $3.1M ARR as a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. The privacy focus isn't a gimmick - it's our core value. The Slow S...
David Cramer started Sentry as django-db-log in 2008. Five years of open source work led to product-market fit from day one when they launched the cloud service.
Geoff Roberts and the Outseta team spent three years getting to about $1.5K MRR, then kept building an integrated SaaS stack until it became a low seven-figure business.
ScreenshotOne took 3 years to reach $10K MRR and another 8 months to hit $20K. Long, slow growth is a valid path to success. The Long Road Many...
Sarah studied graphic design and worked as a product designer at Facebook. There she met her co-founder Andrew. Community First They started wit...
Sidekiq started as an open source project in 2012. I was frustrated with existing Ruby background job solutions and built something better. The Ope...
Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev left Facebook to build a Mac launcher. They gave it away free for 3 years, grew through pure word of mouth, and built an extension ecosystem with 20K+ developer contributors.
WP Engine is my 4th bootstrapped company to hit $1M+. My "A Smart Bear" blog built massive authority that attracted customers and investors. Serial...
Amjad Masad was rejected from YC four times and was stuck at $2.8M ARR after 8 years. When he launched Replit Agent, revenue exploded 25x in 12 months.
Zapier started by finding customers in help forums. We charged $100 for beta access to filter for committed users. With only $1.4M in funding, we buil...