Stories
Stories of founders, businesses, start-ups
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- Solo founders with profitable businesses | blog.kowalczyk.info
- Also: Small business stories | blog.kowalczyk.info
- Collection of successful solo founder stories from HN discussions, from 3K to 1M per month in revenue
- There will always be survivor bias though
- Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue?
- @levelsio Twitter — Solo entrepreneur
- How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea
- Part 1 out of 7 of How to Kickstart and Scale a B2B Business
- Interviews with founders of B2B startups of their stories
- Ideation comes from past pain (retool, linear), ponder and probe (figma, notion), or present pull (slack, loom)
- My $0 → $100m → $0 in 5 years story | r/startup
- Misalignment between founders and VCs kills the company
- Focus on building, selling and delivering, rather than hiring VPs that just bloat payroll unproportionally
- We build the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned | Earthly
- A very good read, from ideation, to launching, to pivoting, to shutting down
- One insight: developer tools should not need demoing. People will buy it, but you cannot sell it.
- My solopreneur story: zero to $45K/mo in 2 years | Tony Dinh
(HN)
- @tdinh_me Twitter
- Creator of Xnapper. His few examples of growing a business in solo and the goods and bads of his lifestyle
- From failed experiences, to building audience, growing 4 successful products
- Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool - what we've learned | Posthog
- Misconceptions about paid ads and agencies
- Conversion, awarness and effectiveness for different marketing channels
- Lessons from my third year running a SaaS
- OnlineOrNot, started as a toy, grew into a SaaS app
- How I turned my open-source project into a business
- EmailEngine, the difference between open source v.s. source available
- Charging business customers is "more reliable and predictable"
- The Reddits | Y Combinator
- The stories of how YC gave Steve and Alexis the idea of Reddit
- The personality of the founders and how that shaped Reddit the product
- How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform
- What existed before GitHub as code hosting
- The gap that GitHub fills in: online code browsing, social interactions, etc.
- Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
(HN)
- Running healthchecks.io, more in the blogs on infra setup and philosophy on running 1 man SaaS
- I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
- Good write-up of the process of building, selling, till burnout, realizing automations and boundaries are needed
- Lessons: don't let it burn you out, B2C is hard, be nice to people and assume good intention
- Why GitHub Actually Won
- GitHub starts at the right time, where contributing to open source is difficult
- GitHub grows with Git and the Ruby community together
- GitHub has taste, it is built for developer, based on user namespace and a pull based model
- I am (not) a Failure: Lessons Learned From Six (and a half) Failed Startup Attempts
- Six failed attempts on startup plus more, stories and lesson for each
- E.g. find good partners, banking industry is reluctant to change, working on infra and standards are hard, a brilliant idea still need a brilliant execution to bring it to life
- How I Built a Company to Save My Open Source Project
(HN)
- A long story of building timefold.ai
- It starts from a hobby project to a day job, to being acquired, then breakdown
- Leap to form a team, secure funding, product market fit and go to market strategy
- $1M Revenue, $0 Profit: Our D2C Reality Check
- Kodgem, a hardware device that help people maintain good posture
- Painful lessons: poor inventory planning, no financial management, V1 UX was bad, bootstrap pride and not taking investments, failed marketplace partnership, and never paying founders causing burnout