Founder stories
238 stories found
After building Ministry of Testing to $1.2M, Rosie started Rosieland to teach community building. Reached $10K/month in 2.5 years.
Marie discovered Notion in 2018 and started sharing tips on YouTube. When her audience asked for a course, she launched Notion Mastery to $40K/month.
Victoria built a WordPress blog with only 89 posts and 15,000 monthly visits to reach $1K/month from affiliate marketing.
Andy left his tech job in 2014 and bootstrapped SevenAtoms to $275K MRR with a 90% client retention rate.
Derryck recognized the growing demand for SEO content and built Big Star Copywriting to $30K/month, surviving the 2008 crash.
Steph leveraged her experience leading content at The Hustle to launch Doing Content Right, earning $40K in the first month.
Nathan turned his podcast interview data into Getlatka, reaching $20K/month in 100 days and $150K MRR within a year.
Ellen pre-sold her first program with zero content, then built it based on customer feedback to reach 7-figure lifetime revenue.
Sumit saw colleagues struggling with Excel and built TrumpExcel to 1M+ monthly pageviews and $10K/month revenue.
Mayank and co-founders leveraged 10+ years of digital marketing experience to build Scalenut to $100K MRR in one year.
Substack found the perfect first customer in Bill Bishop, who generated $100K+ in revenue on his first day going paid.
Prince built Helper-AI and earned $3.5K in 2 months by selling the source code on Gumroad - without a large following.
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.
A non-technical founder went from idea to first customer in 4 days and five figures in 30 days using no-code tools and TikTok.
PostBridge reached $7K/month and 100K users with just 1 hour of daily TikTok content creation - zero ad spend.
Chris and his co-founder validated demand first by talking to WooCommerce store owners, then built One Click Upsells to $1K in 30 days.
After Nomad List, Pieter built Photo AI using PHP/jQuery to $150K/month - 87% profit margin, 100% bootstrapped.
Alex Tew started meditating as a teenager, built the viral Million Dollar Homepage, then channeled that success into co-founding Calm.
Andy Puddicombe spent 10 years as a Buddhist monk, then co-founded Headspace with Rich Pierson to bring meditation to millions.
After nearly a decade in automotive/aerospace, Martin Moravek built Minimalist Phone to solve his own screen addiction problem.
Jesse Mecham built a simple spreadsheet to manage money with his wife. That spreadsheet became YNAB, now used by millions worldwide.
Jon Bittner pivoted from astrophysics to building Splitwise, now used by tens of millions worldwide.
Peter Xu and Harry Yu (twin brothers) leveraged their Stripe and Google experience to build Wanderlog, now top-ranked for travel planning.
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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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