Founder stories
創業者ストーリー
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64件のストーリーが見つかりました
AV
Ana Vershinina
FlapTrip took eleven months of nights and weekends before its first three paying users
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.
初めての顧客 ／ 12 months·チーム
モバイルアプリ旅行Serbia
Chris Meade
Chris Meade emptied a $7,000 401k into volleyball nets and sold them out of a trunk
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.
$100K ARR ／ 1 year·チーム
その他Eコマース🇺🇸 US
Derek Sivers
The favor for a friend that became the largest independent music store online
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.
$100 MRR ／ 1 month·ソロ
マーケットプレイスEコマース🇺🇸 US
DM
Dom Maskell
Dom Maskell sold 1,500 PDF running plans before Runna was an app
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.
$100K ARR ／ 1 year·チーム
モバイルアプリ健康・ウェルネス🇬🇧 GB
Jason Leow
How Jason Leow's coding practice turned into Plugins For Carrd
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.
$100 MRR ／ 4 months·ソロ
その他デザイン🇸🇬 SG
Sam Corcos
How Levels Health went from a $389 beta to a $12,482 month in 158 days
Sam Corcos publishes Levels Health's monthly investor updates in public, so the early revenue line can be read directly instead of reconstructed. It runs $6,774, $4,507, $7,221, $12,482.
$10K MRR ／ 5 months·チーム
モバイルアプリ健康・ウェルネス🇺🇸 US
Tanay Kothari
Tanay Kothari killed a three year hardware product and had Wispr Flow selling in 91 days
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.
初めての顧客 ／ 3 months·チーム
SaaS生産性🇺🇸 US
Tom Blomfield
How Tom Blomfield got Monzo to a million customers without buying them
Monzo shipped a loss making prepaid card as a stand-in for a bank account, put the first 500 into customers' hands 271 days after founding, and reached a million customers in September 2018 with no meaningful ad spend.
初めての顧客 ／ 9 months·チーム
モバイルアプリ金融🇬🇧 GB
Will Ahmed
Will Ahmed spent three years building WHOOP before its first hundred users
Will Ahmed asked athletes what they wanted and heard one thing, asked what their problems were and heard another, then spent three years building for the second answer.
初めての顧客 ／ 3 years·チーム
その他健康・ウェルネス🇺🇸 US
AJ
Arvind Jain
Two years in stealth, then $100M ARR in a little over three years
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.
$100K ARR ／ 6 years·チーム
SaaS生産性🇺🇸 US
Dan Willoughby
How a broken Slack install button turned into $2K MRR
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.
$1K MRR ／ 9 months·ソロ
SaaS生産性Utah, USA
AR
Alex Rainey & Mike Heap
how My AskAI used $5k pre-sales to reach $14k MRR in months
Alex Rainey and Mike Heap tested My AskAI with a $99 pre-sale before the full product existed, generated about $5k from 50+ buyers, then used Product Hunt, word of mouth, and Google search to reach about $14k MRR by May 2023.
$10K MRR ／ 4 months·チーム
SaaSAI / ML🇬🇧 GB
Dan Shipper
how dan shipper's newsletter audience funded a $1.2m suite of ai apps
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.
$100K ARR ／ 3 years·チーム
SaaS生産性New York, USA
SK
Sumit Kumar
how Parqet reached 15k MRR in a year by serving only German investors
Sumit Kumar built a portfolio tracker to scratch his own itch, then kept it deliberately narrow: one country, one language, one currency. That focus took Parqet to €15k MRR in its first year.
$100K ARR ／ 1 year·ソロ
SaaS金融Hamburg, Germany
Alex Danilowicz
how two frontend engineers built magic patterns to $1m arr with no employees
Alex Danilowicz and Teddy Ni were tired of rebuilding Figma mockups in code. They turned that frustration into Magic Patterns, an AI design tool that reached $1M ARR profitably with just the two of them before raising a $6M Series A.
$100K ARR ／ 1 year·チーム
SaaSデザインSan Francisco, USA
Ruslan Leteyski
Checkout X
Bootstrapping Checkout X to €600k MRR before Shopify shut it down
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.
$100K ARR ／ 3 months·ソロ
SaaSEコマースSofia, Bulgaria
Nic Polotnianko
how nic polotnianko grew blogtopin to $15k mrr after four years of failed products
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.
$10K MRR ／ 1 year·ソロ
SaaSマーケティングDnipro, Ukraine
David Bressler
how a non-coder built an ai excel tool to $20k in two months
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.
$100K ARR ／ 4 months·ソロ
SaaSAI / MLOrlando, Florida
Michael Truell
Cursor: From $1M to $100M ARR in 12 Months with Zero Marketing Spend
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.
$100K ARR ／ 2 years·チーム
SaaSAI / ML🇺🇸 US
Varun Mohan
Windsurf: Double Pivot from GPU Infra to a $2.4B AI Code Editor
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.
$100K ARR ／ 4 years·チーム
SaaSAI / ML🇺🇸 US
OG
Ondrej Gazda
Make (Integromat): Bootstrapped from Prague to $107M Acquisition
A team from Prague spent 4 years building before they launched publicly. Zero VC funding. $10M revenue. Acquired by Celonis for $107M.
$10K MRR ／ 8 years·チーム
SaaS生産性🇨🇿 CZ
Thomas Paul Mann
Raycast: 21 months free before monetizing, from 130 to hundreds of thousands of daily users
Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev left Facebook to build a Mac launcher. They gave it away free for 3 years, grew through pure word of mouth, and built an extension ecosystem with 20K+ developer contributors.
$10K MRR ／ 4 years·チーム
SaaS開発者ツール🇬🇧 GB
Noam Shazeer
Character.ai: The Transformer Paper Co-Author Who Left Google to Build a $1B AI Chatbot Platform in 16 Months
Noam Shazeer co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" — the paper that created modern AI. When Google refused to release their chatbot technology, he left to build Character.ai, reaching $1B valuation in 16 months.
初めての顧客 ／ 10 months·チーム
SaaSAI / ML🇺🇸 US
Melanie Perkins
Canva: Rejected 100+ Times, Then Built a $40B Design Empire from Perth, Australia
Melanie Perkins started teaching design tools in college and realized they were too hard to use. After being rejected by 100+ investors, she built Canva into a $40B platform with 220M+ monthly active users.
$100K ARR ／ 4 years·チーム
SaaSデザイン🇦🇺 AU
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