Founder stories
34 témoignages trouvés
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.
Josh launched JobBuddy as a free Reddit side project for cover letters, forgot about it for months, then turned 700 organic users into a freemium AI job-search SaaS at about $1K MRR.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Peer Richelsen launched Calendso as an open-source Calendly alternative, attracted 20K+ GitHub stars, rebranded to Cal.com, and raised $32M.
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.
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.
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.
Shahed Khan and his co-founders pivoted twice before landing on Loom. The async video platform was acquired by Atlassian for $975 million.
Luca documented his solopreneur journey publicly on Twitter, reaching $1.5K MRR in his first year while working a day job.
Built to solve his own problem with Notion navigation, Gourav kept Notion Boost open-source while still earning $9K+ through premium features.
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