Founder stories
365 témoignages trouvés
Ben Waterman left a finance job to build a personal finance dashboard with no coding background, starting in Bubble and reaching $1K MRR with 1,100 monthly active users.
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.
After an unprofitable VC-backed crypto startup, Gil Hildebrand picked a calmer market, presold 50 lifetime deals to a 1,000-person email list, and reached $10k MRR within 100 days of launching Subscribr.
A Ukrainian software engineer spent four years shipping products that went nowhere, then built a Pinterest automation tool to scratch his own itch and grew it past $15k MRR.
Junaid Ansari and his cofounder packaged their freelance design and code work into a flat monthly subscription, then grew it to a 75-person bootstrapped team serving thousands of founders.
Rejected by Y Combinator twice, John O'Nolan crowdfunded Ghost on Kickstarter and built it into a $10M ARR open source publishing platform owned by a non-profit foundation.
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.
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.
David Bressler spent his paternity leave building an AI Excel formula tool with no-code Bubble, then watched influencers turn it into a fast-growing freemium business.
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.
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.
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.
Eddy Vinck shipped his first SaaS, Blog Recorder, as a part-time project and reached $250 MRR and $2,000 in total revenue in six months, with his first customer coming from his own developer network.
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.
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.
Dru Riley quit a big-data job with savings and a vague plan, burned through three years of side projects, then turned weekly research reports into a one-person newsletter that hit roughly $20k MRR within a year of launch.
Four MIT grads spent a year wandering in the desert building CAD tools. When they pivoted to an AI code editor, they built the fastest-growing SaaS product in history.
Anton Osika's weekend hack became the fastest-growing GitHub repo ever. After two failed commercial launches, a rebrand to Lovable hit $10M ARR in 60 days with just 15 people.
Eric Simons spent 7 years building browser-based dev tools at $80K ARR. When Claude 3.5 Sonnet made AI coding viable, a single tweet launched Bolt.new to $4M ARR in 4 weeks.
Aravind Srinivas left OpenAI to attack "solved" search with AI. Perplexity launched 7 days after ChatGPT and grew to $200M ARR by shipping faster than anyone thought possible.
Varun Mohan killed a profitable GPU business to chase AI coding. After pivoting twice, Windsurf grew from $12M to $100M ARR in 4 months — then Google acquired it for $2.4B.
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.
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.
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."
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