47 histoires de fondateurs
Moiz Ali launched Native on Product Hunt in July 2015 with no inventory, no factory and a formula bought from an Etsy seller. He placed his first production order only after 60 units were already sold.
Lorik Morina did not wait for a viral launch. He took a 33-download, zero-MRR first day, layered Hacker News, $20/day Meta ads, Shopify App Store distribution and referral loops, and grew RotateProduct's app revenue to about $6.5K MRR by week 21.
Chris and his co-founder validated demand first by talking to WooCommerce store owners, then built One Click Upsells to $1K in 30 days.
A friend asked Derek Sivers to sell his CD too. He said sure, charged $35 to add an album and $4 per sale, and CD Baby was profitable in its second month.
Three friends put a few thousand dollars into a t-shirt brand in late 2019. Bartlett says the first month brought $26,000 and 651 orders.
Peter Askew won VidaliaOnions.com at auction with a bid he expected to lose, spent a month working out what to do with it, then partnered with a Georgia onion farmer. They forecast 50 orders in season one and shipped over 600.
I built the first version of Gumroad in a weekend while working at Pinterest. The idea was simple: let anyone sell anything with just a link. The W...
Marc Chapon quit restaurant management and built a pet store doing $178,492 in 3 months by dropshipping US/EU products.
Ruslan Leteyski turned a workaround built for a doomed online pharmacy into a one-page Shopify checkout that reached 6,000 merchants and €600k MRR, all without ads or the App Store.
I built Storemapper while traveling as a digital nomad. It started as a simple store locator widget and grew into a stable micro-SaaS business. The...
Gretta van Riel started SkinnyMe Tea in May 2012 with $24 in her bank account, while still working a full time marketing job. She says the brand was doing $600,000 a month within six months of launching.
Mike Beckham and two co-founders put $200,000 into a drinkware brand competing with Yeti. The first bottle sold about six months later, and 24 million followed in seven years.
Max Rhodes left Square to fix wholesale. Faire offered retailers net-60 payment terms and free returns — eliminating the risk of trying new brands. Result: $12.4B valuation, 700K+ retailers.
Jake Karls and his two co-founders started making chocolate bars by hand in a condo kitchen in August 2018. Eleven months in he posted that they had sold 500,000 of them.
Justin Shiels rebuilt his stationery brand SoCurious solo from his Austin apartment, landing 722 orders, 485 preorders from a friend's collab and 38 subscribers in Q1 2026.
After three failed Shopify apps, an engineering student built a bundling app in two weeks and grew it to $25,134 MRR in under a year with no paid ads.
Bryce Adams left a job he loved at Automattic in August 2016 to build the WooCommerce reporting tool nobody else would build. Ten paying stores signed up four months later.
I built my first Chrome extension, Merch Batch Editor, in a weekend, and it earned over $3,000. Merch Wizard came later as a separate, bigger MVP that...
After failing multiple dropshipping stores, Cody Arsenault finally cracked the code: proper branding, niche focus, and relentless ad testing led to $1M in his first successful year.
The Triple Whale founders built an analytics tool for their own DTC brand, then spun it into a 5,000+ customer SaaS with Shopify as an investor.
Grant LaFontaine saw Pokémon card sellers going live on Instagram with clunky workarounds. He built Whatnot — a dedicated live auction platform. Result: $3.7B valuation, 200K+ sellers.
Noah Kagan was fired from Facebook before the IPO. He launched AppSumo with a Reddit post and a $12K deal — building it into $80M+ annual revenue.
Liquid Death was a Facebook page and a fake commercial for over a year before it was a product. By the time the first cans shipped in January 2019, the brand already had 100,000 followers and less than $10k of paid media behind it.
Preetam Nath and Sankalp Jonna turned a two-week Shopify App Store MVP into SuperLemon, a WhatsApp commerce tool that passed $25K MRR with 20,000 merchants and a two-person team.
Manish Chandra bet that fashion resale could be social. Poshmark's Posh Parties turned shopping into community events. Result: IPO at $7.4B, 80M+ users.
Ben Francis was delivering pizzas when he started screen-printing fitness apparel in his garage. By partnering with YouTube fitness influencers, he turned Gymshark into a £1.45B brand.
Before quitting his job in April 2014, Justin Mares put a $29.99 bone broth page online with a PayPal checkout and about $50 of Bing ads. Two weeks later he had taken nearly $500 for a product that did not exist.
Chris Meade pulled about $7,000 out of his 401k, spent all of it on inventory, and sold nets off the sand on Venmo. Eight years later CROSSNET had passed $35 million in sales and was acquired.
Beardbrand started with just a $30 Shopify subscription. Now we have 1.6M YouTube subscribers. Authenticity beats production quality. $30 Start...
I'm the self-proclaimed 'winner of Indie Hackers' - if you filter for solo founders with verified Stripe revenue, I come up at the top. Simple Valu...
Started printing posters in a living room, Davis Siksnans bootstrapped Printful to $289M revenue and 1,700+ employees.
Mark Forrester met his co-founders in an online forum, launched WooThemes, then WooCommerce - acquired by Automattic for $30M+.
Eddie Machaalani met his co-founder Mitch Harper in an IRC chat room in 2003, and built BigCommerce to a $4.6B valuation.
Sahil Lavingia left Pinterest before vesting, raised $8M, laid off 75% of staff, then rebuilt Gumroad as a profitable "small" business.
Davis Siksnans started printing t-shirts in his co-founder's garage at age 22 and built Printful to $1B+ valuation.
Rob Kalin built Etsy as a cheaper alternative to eBay for handmade goods. The marketplace is now worth $45 billion and changed how makers sell their work.
Simon Beckerman created Depop to let people buy and sell clothes on a social marketplace. The app attracted Gen Z and sold to Etsy for $1.6 billion.
Picture ItAlex acquired an existing Shopify app and scaled it to $3,500 MRR through product improvements and customer focus.
Sergi Ruiz and his wife launched Mapness in 2017 selling custom map prints. Organic Instagram posts grew into a six-figure pandemic peak, then a slow fade.
Erikas Malisauskas quit freelancing and built 5 Shopify apps generating $4.5M annually without any paid marketing.
Yoni Elbaz and Moran Benisty met at Sears R&D in Israel and bootstrapped Loox to $15M+ ARR without paying themselves for 15 months.
Chris Koh spent years working with eSellers before writing the first code for GemPages, a Shopify page builder now used by 100K+ merchants.
ShopifyTobi Lütke built Shopify because he wanted to sell snowboards online and hated the existing software.
Ben Jabbawy built Privy into the #1 Shopify sales app with 500K+ merchants, driving $6B+ in eCommerce sales before a successful exit.
Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen bootstrapped Klaviyo to over $1M ARR before raising, eventually building a $6B+ public company.
BOOM! by Cindy Joseph made almost nothing for four years. Then Firestone published the exact numbers behind a month where $434,256.72 of advertising produced $1,422,500.15 in sales.
Elliot Sowersby spent three years building Coupon Affiliates with little to show for it. A decade later it is his biggest source of income and plugins make up over 90% of his revenue.