Founder stories
25 co-founderss who succeeded with Twitter / X
We built Tailwind CSS as an open source project, then launched Tailwind UI as a commercial product. The first day made $500K. Building in Open Sour...
Hypefury started as a weekend project. I built the MVP in 3 days after spotting a gap in Twitter tools. Two years later, we hit $23K MRR and kept grow...
Before Taplio succeeded, I shipped 11 products in 4 months. The key was speed and willingness to move on from failures. The Shipping Mindset I r...
Tyler Denk joined Morning Brew in 2017 as the second employee, where he led product, growth, and engineering. The Opportunity After building the...
In December 2020, Dickie Bush tweeted: 'is anyone interested in doing a daily writing challenge for 30 days?' Rapid Validation Around 20 people...
David Perell launched Write of Passage in April 2019 with ~150 students at $600. He ran it with Tiago Forte. Instant Success Even the first coho...
Dagobert quit his high-paying job to build Logology with his designer wife, growing from $300 to $3K/month using only Twitter.
Francesco and co-founders launched Typefully on Product Hunt and Hacker News, getting 1,432 signups on day one. Now at $100K+ MRR.
Paul Yacoubian launched Copy.ai on Twitter and grew to $157K MRR in 10 months by building in public and leveraging GPT-3.
After building Moz to $30M ARR then stepping down, Rand Fishkin bootstrapped SparkToro to 1,000+ paying customers with a radically different approach.
Kayla Itsines started at 18 training women in her parents backyard in Adelaide, created a PDF workout guide that went viral on Instagram, and sold her Sweat app for $400M.
Justin Jackson and Jon Buda built Transistor to over $1M ARR while documenting everything publicly on their "Build Your SaaS" podcast.
Samy Dindane and Yannick Veys scaled Hypefury from a tweet asking about thread scheduling to a 7-figure bootstrapped business.
The Triple Whale founders built an analytics tool for their own DTC brand, then spun it into a 5,000+ customer SaaS with Shopify as an investor.
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.
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."
Victor Perez and Diego Rodriguez dropped King of Spain scholarships at Cornell to build Krea AI. A localhost demo posted on Twitter generated $10K in subscriptions in 24 hours. They grew to 20M users with just 8 people.
Nick Huber started Storage Squad at Cornell, expanded to 25 college towns, then caught the self-storage bug. He used Twitter to raise $20M+ and scale to 63+ properties worth $150M+, while building Sweaty Startup into a media brand.
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis bet that website owners would pay for analytics that didn't track visitors. GDPR made privacy a selling point. Result: $100K+ ARR, profitable, bootstrapped — no VC needed.
Shaan Puri had 300K+ Twitter followers. He and Ben Levy launched Milk Road in February 2022. Ten months later, they sold it to Beehiiv.
A side project to catch the ChatGPT wave became a paid Substack newsletter doing roughly $30k a month, built on quarterly product drops and a founding member tier.
John Rush built SEObot to automate SEO for his own 24 projects, then opened it up and reached roughly $1M ARR within a year of its public launch.
Mattia Pomelli and two friends repurposed an earlier design tool into Sleek, an AI mobile app designer, and reached $10k MRR within six weeks of launch without spending on ads.
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