Reilly Chase spent his career in IT, installing Ubiquiti networking gear for clients. The repetitive part bothered him: every customer network needed its own UniFi controller, and managing them one by one did not scale. He wanted a single place to run them all, so he built HostiFi, a hosting service that does exactly that for other IT providers. It was his first software product, put together with a WordPress front end, Stripe for billing, and Python scripts on a cron job that provisioned servers automatically. He had no formal development experience and learned what he needed as he went.

HostiFi launched on May 24, 2018 as a side project alongside his IT services business. The hard part was that Reilly did not personally know a single person who needed UniFi hosting, so the usual path of friends, referrals, and word of mouth was closed to him. Instead he tried to find where Ubiquiti users already gathered online. Most of his early attempts flopped. An Upwork profile brought zero leads. A LinkedIn company page got 15 total impressions over five months. A Reddit post asking for feedback was deleted by the r/Ubiquiti moderators within minutes.

Two channels did work. The first was Twitter: he had set up the HostiFi account a week before launch and spent that time following the #Ubiquiti and #UniFi hashtags, liking and retweeting and engaging with the people posting there. His launch tweet drove the first real spike of traffic, and Twitter became the first place he felt genuine traction because he could talk to potential customers directly. The second was helping out on a Ubiquiti forum. Cold private messages asking for feedback went nowhere, but answering people's UniFi questions without pitching anything quietly sent traffic to the site and brought in customers. By June 16, three weeks after launch, he had 11 paying customers.

From there the slow compounding began. Pricing started at just $5 a month, which kept margins thin and attracted price-sensitive users, so he later raised the minimum to $19. By the end of 2018 he was at roughly $2,275 MRR. Then in January 2019 he was fired from his day job, sold his house to extend his runway, and committed fully to HostiFi. He hit $10K MRR about eight months later, raised $100K from Calm Company Fund, and kept building. By 2026 HostiFi reports more than $3M a year in revenue, a team of around 10, and over 3,000 customers, all of which traces back to those first 11 sign-ups found by being useful in the right corners of the internet.