Founder stories
40 founders who reached $100K ARR using Twitter / X
My journey took me from being a Paris waiter to an $80,000/month solopreneur over seven years of persistence. After 17 failed projects, I found succes...
After selling my previous AI company Headlime for seven figures, I took time off in 2021. I was growing increasingly bored when an idea struck me: why...
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...
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...
I was SVP of Sales when I had a panic attack from burnout. I quit to build a solo business. Now I make $5M/year with 89% profit margin and zero ads....
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...
Kieran Drew was a dentist working 50-60 hours per week when he decided to build an online business. Premium Pricing He launched High Impact Writ...
Just a few months ago I was in my 4th year of college, interning at FAANG companies like Meta and Tesla. Then I placed my side hustle in front of the...
Left Amazon with 150 Twitter followers. Three years later, $1M in cumulative revenue from info products and community.
Started with a blog nobody read. Rebranded to Creator Science and built to $500K/year through newsletter, podcast, and community.
After Nomad List, Pieter built Photo AI using PHP/jQuery to $150K/month - 87% profit margin, 100% bootstrapped.
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.
Zeno Rocha created the Dracula color theme in 2013 while in a hospital, to cope with bad lighting conditions. Seven years and 3 million downloads later, he launched a paid version — and made $5K in 72 hours.
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.
Brett Williams had been designing since 2009. In 2017 he launched DesignJoy — a subscription design service. A viral tweet in 2020 doubled his MRR overnight. By 2022, he broke $1.5M ARR as a true agency of one.
After two acquisitions (5by by StumbleUpon, Islands by WeWork) and advisory roles at TikTok and Reddit, Greg Isenberg launched Late Checkout. In three years, it hit 8 figures with zero outside capital.
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 Butcher assembled cars at a Honda factory, talked his way into design school, spent 8 years at agencies, then burned out running his own. In January 2019, he started posting simple visuals on Twitter. Within 18 months: $180K/month.
Dan Koe tried fitness YouTube, dropshipping, a Facebook ads agency, and two e-commerce brands — all failed. Then he started writing on Twitter. Within 4 years: $3.3M/year and 3.4M followers.
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.
JR Farr built Lemon Squeezy in public on Twitter, targeting indie hackers who needed simpler alternatives to Stripe for selling digital products. Stripe acquired it in 2024.
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.
Tired of paying for overpriced social schedulers, Jack Friks shipped his own simple tool in about a month and built it in public to roughly $11k MRR.
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.
Matt McGarry launched Newsletter Operator in January 2023 with a tweet and a 1,300-follower audience. Within a year and a half it grew past 25,000 subscribers and supported a 7-figure business built on courses and an agency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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