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Co-Founders First customer Stories
26 Co-Founderss who reached First customer
Key Statistics
Stories
26
Avg Time
8 months
Fastest
0 days
Solo
0%
Top growth channel
Word of mouth (7)
BB
Brianna Blaney & Dr. Aria Hahn
From an oversubscribed alpha to $2M+ in funding for our startup
We started Pocketed during the pandemic to help startups find grants and funding they didn't know existed. The Idea During COVID, there was sudd...
First customer in 0 days·Team
SaaSFinanceVancouver, BC, Canada
Pierre de Wulf
From 2 Failed Products to API Success: First Customer in 50 Minutes
Pierre de Wulf and his co-founder Kevin met in high school. After building ShopToList and PricingBot with limited success, they went all-in on Scrapin...
First customer in 0 days·Team
API / developer toolDeveloper tools🇫🇷 FR
Hamish McKenzie
Newsletter Platform Co-Founder Lands First Publisher, Who Books Six Figures on Day One
Substack found its first customer in Bill Bishop, whose Sinocism newsletter reached a six-figure annual run rate on its first paid day.
$45M/yr·First customer in 3 months·Team
SaaSContent creation🇺🇸 US
Immad Akhund
After Selling Heyzap for $45M, Building a Bank for Startups
Immad Akhund left Google and sold his first startup for $45M before building Mercury, the go-to banking platform for startups valued at $3.5B.
$650M/yr·First customer in 6 months·Team
SaaSFinance🇺🇸 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
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.
$50M/yr·First customer in 10 months·Team
SaaSAI / ML🇺🇸 US
MH
Michele Hansen
A side-project API that only needed to cover server costs
Michele and Mathias Hansen launched Geocodio as a side project in January 2014. A roughly $30 first month covered their small DigitalOcean server bill and proved strangers would pay.
First customer in 1 month·Team
API / developer toolDeveloper tools🇺🇸 US
YB
Yasha Boroumand
how Yasha Boroumand dogfooded FlowHunt to $10k/mo
After two failed URLSlab attempts, Yasha Boroumand turned FlowHunt into an AI-agent builder, used the product to automate its own SEO engine, and grew to $10k/month with $6k recurring subscriptions plus $4k one-off credits.
$72K/yr·First customer in 1 month·Team
SaaSAI / ML🇸🇰 SK
KO
Kylan O'Connor, Jayden Francis, Justin Rausch & Parker May
How RidePal turned a niche mountain-biking app into 35 paying Android customers on day one
RidePal did not start with a broad fitness app. The team built directly for mountain bikers, shared beta versions in rider communities, and saw 35 paying Android customers on launch day.
First customer in 1 days·Team
Mobile appHealth & wellnessSan Francisco, United States
AC
Abhishek Chakravarty and Davis Baer
How Youform reached $18K MRR by becoming the affordable Typeform alternative
Abhishek Chakravarty spotted Typeform users looking for a cheaper form builder, sold his adjacent chatbot product, and built Youform into an $18K MRR freemium SaaS with pricing people could understand.
$216K/yr·First customer in 1 year·Team
SaaSProductivityIndia / USA
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.
First customer in 12 months·Team
Mobile appTravelSerbia
Brian Chesky
Three airbeds paid the rent, then Airbnb went a year with no traction
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had paying guests within a week of the idea because a design conference had sold out every hotel in San Francisco. Turning that weekend into a company took a year of failed launches, credit card debt and cereal money.
$12.2B/yr·First customer in 7 days·Team
MarketplaceTravelSan Francisco, USA
Eric Migicovsky
Beeper charged $10 a month from its first public day
Eric Migicovsky named Beeper in public in July 2020 and launched it on Hacker News 195 days later as a paid chat app at $10 a month. Automattic bought it in April 2024.
First customer in 7 months·Team
SaaSProductivity🇺🇸 US
JR
Johannes Reck
Five bookings in two years, three from his mother, then GetYourGuide started over
Two years of building a peer to peer student guide platform produced exactly five bookings, three of them from Johannes Reck's mother. Then a Swiss rafting company called.
$1B/yr·First customer in 2 years·Team
MarketplaceTravel🇩🇪 DE
Julian Hearn
Two orders on day one: how Julian Hearn started Huel from his garage
Huel's website went live with no buzz at all and took two orders on the first day. Julian Hearn packed them himself, and says revenue reached £9 million two years later.
$103M/yr·First customer in 1 days·Team
OtherHealth & wellness🇬🇧 GB
Kristo Käärmann
Wise launched with a one pound fee and had customers moving money in seven days
TransferWise went live on 24 January 2011 with a flat one pound fee and one TechCrunch post. Seven days later the founders reported customers moving money between eight countries.
$1.2B/yr·First customer in 7 days·Team
MarketplaceFinance🇬🇧 GB
Matthieu Rouif
Two weeks from the first commit to a paid app: how Matthieu Rouif started Photoroom
Matthieu Rouif and Eliot Andres shipped the first version of Photoroom, then called BG, fourteen days after the first line of code, with subscriptions already wired in. It now processes more than 7 billion images a year.
$50M/yr·First customer in 14 days·Team
Mobile appDesign🇫🇷 FR
MB
Mike Beckham
Six months of research, then the first Simple Modern bottle sold
Mike Beckham and two co-founders put $200,000 into a drinkware brand competing with Yeti. The first bottle sold about six months later, and 24 million followed in seven years.
$200M/yr·First customer in 7 months·Team
OtherE-commerce🇺🇸 US
MC
Mike Cessario
Mike Cessario spent 14 months building an audience for Liquid Death before there was a can to sell
Liquid Death was a Facebook page and a fake commercial for over a year before it was a product. By the time the first cans shipped in January 2019, the brand already had 100,000 followers and less than $10k of paid media behind it.
$263M/yr·First customer in 1 year·Team
OtherE-commerce🇺🇸 US
Peter Askew
He bought an expired domain for $2,200, then went looking for a farmer
Peter Askew won VidaliaOnions.com at auction with a bid he expected to lose, spent a month working out what to do with it, then partnered with a Georgia onion farmer. They forecast 50 orders in season one and shipped over 600.
First customer in 1 month·Team
OtherE-commerce🇺🇸 US
Taimur Abdaal
Causal went 18 months with nobody paying, then landed a first customer at $300 a month
Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis quit their jobs in 2019 to build a better spreadsheet. Users called it cool and left. The first paying customer only arrived in early 2021, after they booked 40 demos in a single month and ran a free pilot.
First customer in 1 year·Team
SaaSFinance🇬🇧 GB
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.
First customer in 3 months·Team
SaaSProductivity🇺🇸 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.
First customer in 9 months·Team
Mobile appFinance🇬🇧 GB
Volkan Kaya
Seven months on an MVP, then a free side tool brought Versoly its first paying customer
Volkan Kaya and his co-founder spent seven months building a website builder nobody would use for free. A two week side project that hit number one on Product Hunt finally produced customer number one.
$126K/yr·First customer in 7 months·Team
SaaSDesign🇬🇧 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.
First customer in 3 years·Team
OtherHealth & wellness🇺🇸 US
Yahya Mokhtarzada
Two years free, then the last chance subscription that saved Truebill
Truebill spent two years as a free app whose founders assumed nobody would pay a subscription to cancel subscriptions. The premium tier they shipped as a last resort converted at 3.5 times what Yahya Mokhtarzada expected.
sold for $1.3B·First customer in 2 years·Team
Mobile appFinance🇺🇸 US
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Stories26
Avg Time8 months
Fastest0 days
Technical81%
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