Cases

99designs moved informal design contests off SitePoint into a separate brand in 2008 and later reported $15 million in annual revenue.

Airbnb's founders shot New York listings with a rented $5,000 camera, and the city's revenue reportedly doubled by the end of that month.

Algolia offers DocSearch free to eligible documentation sites that keep a Search by Algolia link, and its homepage says more than 9,000 projects use it.

Avvo published rated profiles for 97% of US lawyers and a free Q&A forum of 11 million entries, and drew over 100 million annual visits by its 2018 sale.

Baremetrics launched with no list, beta or free plan and one-click setup, then reached its first 100 paying customers in about 4 months, mostly via Twitter.

Baremetrics published all its revenue, then launched Open Startups with seven companies, citing over 125,000 entrepreneurs following along by launch day.

Patrick McKenzie got most Bingo Card Creator traffic from Google and AdWords in 2012, when sales rose 55% to 2,254 and net revenue reached $64,791.81.

Candy Japan's founder posted his new candy subscription on Hacker News, blogs covered it unprompted, and he had 300 paying subscribers within four months.

Codecademy put signup after the first few lessons so visitors wrote code in seconds, and its cofounder reported 200,000 unique users in three days.

ConvertKit sold to a niche through direct outreach and moved customers' lists for them, and MRR rose from $1,337 in September 2014 to over $30,000 a month.

DigitalOcean paid Community authors about $300 per tutorial, and an outside analysis credits its 6,000+ tutorials with over 5 million monthly visits.

Encharge emailed about 500 leads a mock prototype and an $89 lifetime pre-order, and took 50 pre-orders and about $4,000 before building the product.

Eraser launched DiagramGPT, an ungated AI diagram generator with its own brand, and the founder says it now brings in 30% of new sign-ups.

Etsy sent a team to art and craft shows nearly every weekend to sign up influential makers, and had about 9,000 sellers by the end of its first year.

Evernote kept its main app free and tracked conversion by cohort age: 0.5% of signups paid in month one, rising to 5.5% after two years.

Granola spread its bot-free AI notepad through VC firms first, and a newsletter reports 10% week-over-week growth, which it ties to the no-bot design.

Graza sent 300 packages to Instagram food creators as its whole early ad budget, then sold out its launch inventory in a day and passed $4 million in first-year sales.

GreyNoise gave analysts a free Community tier and sold automated access to enterprises, then reported over 100% growth in commercial customers and ARR in a year.

Groove posted its monthly revenue in public on its blog, from a first update of $30,155 to a later $106,131, though no post ties the growth to publishing.

Gumroad let creators sell directly to social followers, and weeks after launch some artists had made thousands while traffic matched Pinterest's January 2011 level.

Gymshark sent free stringers to lifters it admired in 2012 and signed them as athletes. It says sales went from £300 a day to £30,000 in 30 minutes after the Luxe launch at BodyPower 2013.

Importify listed its dropshipping app in the Shopify App Store in December 2016 and later reported over 7,500 paying clients and over $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Taylor Otwell turned his server chores into Laravel Forge, a paid tool for Laravel users, and WorkOS reports thousands of paying customers within a month.

New Relic offered a free Data Nerd shirt to anyone who created an account and deployed its agent, and Printfection says qualified leads rose 30%.

Pipedrive's support team onboarded trial users and did the selling, and the two co-founders reached about 100 small customers in five to six months.

PostHog put its open-source analytics MVP on Hacker News and GitHub in 2020 and had hundreds of users within a month, without heavy outreach.

ProfitWell offered its Metrics reporting tool free and built paid churn and pricing products on the data. The founder says about 35,000 companies use it.

Refactoring UI gave its higher tier more space, a bigger font and the primary button, and 78% of purchases went to that tier by January 2019.

Rows removed its sign-up wall so visitors could try the AI spreadsheet first, and a newsletter reports sign-up conversions rose 72% after the change.

Sentry's founder put Stripe billing on a hosted version of the open-source tool and had a paying customer on day one and ten within a few days.

SimpleLogin made its server, browser extension and mobile apps open source from day one, and says it has helped over 50,000 people since its 2020 launch.

Snappr let anyone book a shoot on its self-serve marketplace, and 48% of its Workflows enterprise customers had booked that way before signing up.

Square handed out its card reader free and earned a flat 2.75 percent per transaction, reporting 1 million users and $4 million a day by August 2011.

Standuply was featured on the Slack App Directory main page in March 2017 and, within two weeks, gained 750 signups and reached 1,000 teams.

Tailwind Labs built Tailwind UI, a paid product for users of free Tailwind CSS, and was about to pass $2 million in revenue about 5 months after launch.

Testimonial.to founder Damon Chen paid $35,000 for testimonial.io, the address visitors kept typing by mistake, and says it brought in $80K in lifetime revenue.

Thumbtack's founders found local service pros' emails by hand and messaged them directly, which co-founder Sander Daniels says brought in the first 1,000 users.

Urban Tastebud wrote all its content as list articles with affiliate links, and the founder said in a 2021 interview that the site makes $51,000 a month at a 72% average net profit.

Wave offered free accounting and invoicing software, then charged for bank transfers, loans and payroll; when H&R Block bought it in 2019 it had 400,000+ customers and over $50 million in yearly revenue.

Wistia added a play button and time stamp to email images across seven A/B tests and saw clicks rise 21.52% on average, with a 40.83% lift in the first test.

Jason Cohen asked WordPress developers on LinkedIn for an hour to discuss his idea before WP Engine existed: 40 of 50 agreed and 30 later became customers.

Yammer let employees join a private network for free, then turned that use into company accounts, and it reported more than 5 million corporate users at its sale.

Zapier's founder answered integration questions in other SaaS forums before mentioning the product, and each link brought roughly 10 to 20 visitors.