Founder stories
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Ad-supported Business Stories
8 founders with Ad-supported businesses
Key Statistics
Stories
8
Avg Time
3 years
Fastest
1 days
Solo
38%
Top growth channel
Product Hunt (2)
Filter further:With Co-Founders (5)
Mubashar Iqbal
How building 120+ side projects led to a viral hit with 14M page views
After 80+ failed projects, one finally went viral. 4 million page views in 4 weeks, $4K/month in ad revenue, then sold.
$1K MRR in 2 months·Team
OtherEducation🇺🇸 US
ML
Mike Lee
MyFitnessPal: From Personal Diet Tracker to $475M Acquisition
Mike Lee built a calorie counter to lose weight for his wedding, then bootstrapped it to 80M+ users.
sold for $475M·$100K ARR in 7 years·Solo
Mobile appHealth & wellness🇺🇸 US
Michael Mignano
Democratizing Podcasting: How Anchor Became Spotify for Creators
Michael Mignano built Anchor to make podcast creation free and easy. The platform now powers one-third of all new podcasts and was acquired by Spotify.
sold for $154M·First customer in 1 days·Team
SaaSContent creation🇺🇸 US
Alex Lieberman
How Two College Students Built a Newsletter to 4M+ Subscribers and a $75M Acquisition
Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started Morning Brew as a college newsletter. A viral referral program fueled growth. Business Insider acquired it for ~$75M in 2020.
sold for $75M·$100K ARR in 3 years·Team
OtherContent creation🇺🇸 US
Shaan Puri & Ben Levy
How Two Founders Grew a Crypto Newsletter to 250K Subscribers in 10 Months — Then Sold It
Shaan Puri had 300K+ Twitter followers. He and Ben Levy launched Milk Road in February 2022. Ten months later, they sold it to Beehiiv.
$100K ARR in 10 months·Team
OtherContent creation🇺🇸 US
ZM
Zuhayeer Musa & Zaheer Mohiuddin
How Two Engineers Built Levels.fyi into the Definitive Tech Compensation Platform With Zero Marketing Spend
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.
$100K ARR in 3 years·Team
SaaSProductivity🇺🇸 US
Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier started CSS-Tricks for beer money and sold it 15 years later
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.
First customer in 7 months·Solo
OtherEducation🇺🇸 US
IK
Ivan Kutskir
Four years and 7,000 hours before Photopea made a dollar
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.
$1M/yr·$100K ARR in 7 years·Solo
SaaSDesign🇨🇿 CZ
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Quick Stats
Stories8
Avg Time3 years
Fastest1 days
Technical75%