Topic
Verified stories of the people who built companies, products and apps, and how they actually did it.
Bannerbear's founder recorded the flat 18 months as carefully as the good ones. The two changes that ended the flat line were a rebuild as an API and a price that went from $9 to $49.
ShipFast took about a week to package and, per Starter Story, made $528,000 in four months. Lou's own public dashboard now shows it as the fifth line in his portfolio at $4.8k a month.
Vassallo published a line-by-line accounting of two digital products: a 173-page PDF and a 100-minute video. It shows which tweet earned what, which price cut worked, and which channel he abandoned.
FeedbackPanda started as a script to save one online English teacher two hours a night. Two years later it had roughly 5,000 customers at $15 a month and a seven-figure exit.
Balsamiq launched in June 2008 and its founder reported profitability within three weeks. Eighteen years later it is still bootstrapped, and its 2024 revenue was $6.58 million, down 6%.
Sara Blakely started Spanx with $5,000 in savings, wrote her own patent application to save the legal fees, and reported $4 million of revenue in the first year. Each early decision was a substitution of effort for money.
In March 2016 a British startup with a prepaid card and 3,000 testers raised a million pounds from the public in 96 seconds. The cap on each investment was the point.
In March 2014 a Dutch developer promised to launch one product a month for a year. A decade later he publishes six-figure monthly revenue from products he still builds alone.
John O'Nolan funded Ghost with a 2013 Kickstarter for software that barely existed, then structured it as a non-profit so it could never be sold. The public dashboard now shows eight figures of recurring revenue.
In September 2014, ConvertKit was making $1,337 a month and looked finished. Thirteen months later it passed $30,000. The turnaround came from four decisions, none of them about the product.
Buffer launched on November 30, 2010 and had a paying customer within days. The famous landing page test that preceded it is widely imitated and almost always copied wrong.
Sahil Lavingia built Gumroad over a weekend in 2011 and 52,000 people used it on day one. The launch was the easy part. What he published about the eight years that followed is the more useful story.