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462 témoignages trouvés
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.
Her first digital course made $267 and she cried about it. Sixteen years later she reports a $120 million business built on relaunching the same courses.
Ana Vershinina and two co founders built a travel planner on evenings and weekends around full time jobs. Eleven days after launch: 700 installs and three PRO subscribers.
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.
Reforge started as a weekend side project Brian Balfour ran while still at HubSpot. Five years later it was profitable with eight figures of revenue, and only then did he take outside money.
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had paying guests within a week of the idea because a design conference had sold out every hotel in San Francisco. Turning that weekend into a company took a year of failed launches, credit card debt and cereal money.
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.
Cedric Isubol built an AI calorie tracker for the home cooked local food that western nutrition databases do not recognize. Two weeks after the Google Play launch it had 14 paying subscribers and $35 in monthly recurring revenue, with no ad spend and one marketing channel.
Chris Coyier launched css-tricks.com on July 4, 2007 as SEO filler in a network of Adobe help sites. By his own 2007 wrap up post in January 2008 the blog already had paying sponsors, and in March 2022 he sold it to DigitalOcean.
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.
A designer who had made about 150 client logos built his own logo maker in two and a half months, launched it on Product Hunt, and made nearly $70,000 in February 2017.
Deepak Kanakaraju spent three years writing at DigitalDeepak.com without selling anything. In August 2016 he published an outline for a course he had not made, emailed his list, and took 250 pre-orders in a week.
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.
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.
Ben Parker and Dom Maskell quit their jobs in June 2021 to sell personalised running plans as emailed PDFs. The app came eighteen months later, and Strava bought the company in April 2025.
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.
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.
Gagan Biyani tested one live course before writing any software, launched Maven to a $4M course sales run rate in three months, then discovered the customers paying him did not need him.
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.
Ivan Kutskir built a browser based Photoshop alternative alone for four years without earning anything, then found that five cents per user hour adds up.
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.
Jason Leow built tiny Vue apps to teach himself to code, then noticed they filled gaps in Carrd. Three months of free plugins later he charged for the first one, and year one closed at $1,099.
Magnific AI opened on 27 November 2023 with a waitlist, two founders and no free trial. Five months later it had 725,000 registered users and Freepik had bought it.
A non technical founder with a full time job built a flight deals email list on Instapage and MailChimp, priced it at $1, $9 and $19 a month, and had 100 paying members by the end of month one.
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