Founder stories
44 stories found
I was a psychology major in college. One day I learned about Uber and decided I wanted to be in tech. So I moved to San Francisco, attended a coding b...
Erwin had two failed projects before Tailscan. He gave himself a week to build something and showcase it on Twitter. Viral Demo His demo got 70,...
Mustafa Ergisi, a former data analyst from Istanbul, was frustrated spending countless hours optimizing SQL queries manually. With a background in mac...
Dagobert quit his high-paying job to build Logology with his designer wife, growing from $300 to $3K/month using only Twitter.
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 building Ministry of Testing to $1.2M, Rosie started Rosieland to teach community building. Reached $10K/month in 2.5 years.
Steph leveraged her experience leading content at The Hustle to launch Doing Content Right, earning $40K in the first month.
Luca documented his solopreneur journey publicly on Twitter, reaching $1.5K MRR in his first year while working a day job.
Morflax launched with a viral tweet about the 3D mockup builder and generated $7K revenue in the first month.
After Nomad List, Pieter built Photo AI using PHP/jQuery to $150K/month - 87% profit margin, 100% bootstrapped.
After 12 startups in 12 months challenge, Jon found his calling in automated image generation and bootstrapped Bannerbear to $50K+ MRR.
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.
Justin Moore made over $5M in sponsorships himself before building Creator Wizard to help other creators do the same.
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.
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A note on these stories: The founders featured here represent those who publicly shared their success. Not every startup succeeds, and timelines vary widely. These stories are meant to inspire and educate, not to set expectations.
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Showing 25 to 44 of 44 stories