39 histoires de fondateurs
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 in one-time template sales.
Built to solve his own problem with Notion navigation, Gourav kept Notion Boost open-source while still earning $9K+ through premium features.
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.
In July 2024 Tanay Kothari shut down the hardware Wispr had spent three years building and cut the team from 40 people to 5. The dictation app that replaced it was in users' hands six weeks later and selling subscriptions by the end of September.
Chetan built Schedo because scheduling tools felt dated, validated it through communities and his own meetings, and turned a local window-cleaning customer paying $12/month into proof that the product could sell.
Edmund Yong turned his own overflowing ChatGPT sidebar into Easy Folders, a Chrome extension that added folders, search and prompt management before native AI-chat organization caught up.
Eric Migicovsky named Beeper in public in July 2020 and launched it on Hacker News 195 days later as a paid chat app at $10 a month. Automattic bought it in April 2024.
Noah Bragg built Supportman on nights and weekends for Intercom support teams, needed 7.5 months to reach $100 MRR, then later sold the small SaaS for $27k after it grew to about $400 MRR.
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...
Dan Willoughby left Tellspin as a landing page with a broken Slack install button, then built the MVP only after users hunted down his email. One year later it had 100 customers and $2,033 MRR.
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.
Abhishek Chakravarty spotted Typeform users looking for a cheaper form builder, sold his adjacent chatbot product, and built Youform into an $18K MRR freemium SaaS with pricing people could understand.
After walking away from a Slack competitor he had built for a year, Derrick Reimer took on Calendly instead and passed $10K MRR twelve months after starting to write SavvyCal.
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.
Josh launched JobBuddy as a free Reddit side project for cover letters, forgot about it for months, then turned thousands of organic Reddit users into a freemium AI job-search SaaS at about $1K MRR.
In 2023, Iuliia built 10 products. Her partner Marc launched Papermark - a simple open-source DocSend alternative. The first version took one weekend....
After 24 years in SaaS, I built GMass with just $10K initial investment and 11 employees. Bootstrap Forever I've been bootstrapping since the 90...
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...
Maciej Cupial from Poland had a background as a programmer and entrepreneur. After a challenging 2.5 years building Calendesk, he finally reached $100...
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 over $1M ARR with absolutely zero marketing spend. The Launch Product Hunt la...
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.
Akiflow's first product was a command bar that made other task apps faster. The founders scrapped it, rebuilt around one inbox and one calendar, and hit $1M ARR in March 2024.
Sorin Alupoaie did not start Swifteq by chasing a giant SaaS idea. He watched Zendesk support teams repeat the same painful workflows, shipped tiny apps around those pains, and grew a portfolio to €20K+ MRR.
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.
Arvind Jain could not buy an enterprise search product that worked, so he spent more than two years building one in stealth. In February 2025 he said Glean had passed $100 million in ARR.
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.
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.