Issue 72 · August 2026
In 2026, the endpoint you optimize for growth is the same one fraudsters optimize for abuse. A composite founder diary about the morning a card-testing bot turned a frictionless signup form at $35K MRR into a stolen-card validation service, and the 48-hour scramble to shut it down.
In-depth founder interviews, MRR journeys and post-mortems, with the real numbers.
Mailchimp hit about $800M in revenue with zero venture capital, sold to Intuit for roughly $12B in 2021, and in May 2026 Intuit confirmed its revenue is now declining. A source-typed ledger, and what actually transfers.
In 2026, the fastest way to lose your biggest customer is a backup you never tested. A composite founder diary about the night a botched production migration erased roughly 22 hours of customer data at $40K MRR, when the newer backup had been failing silently for months and the freshest clean copy was almost a day old. It covers what was lost, the email that had to go out, the agency that churned, and the restore-drill and point-in-time-recovery changes that cut the recovery point objective from about a day to five minutes.
Craigslist has never disclosed its finances, so every revenue figure is an estimate. The famous $694M stat is a frozen 2018 peak; AIM Group data shows it has fallen to about $302M by 2024. Here is the sourced ledger and the operator lesson.
In 2026, one four-sentence email can undo a year of growth. A composite founder diary about the month a core integration partner raised its API price roughly 10x and gutted its free tier overnight at $46K MRR, echoing the real 2023 Reddit and Twitter/X API shocks: the triage, the customer email, and the re-architecture that cut our single-vendor dependency.
Midjourney has never disclosed revenue, so 2026 estimates run from $150M to $500M ARR. Here is the sourced ledger, the pricing math, and the number that actually holds.
At $42K MRR I finally added up what an AppSumo lifetime deal I ran years earlier was really costing me: about 1,150 active lifetime accounts paying $0 a month while eating support and server costs. A 2026 founder diary on the long tail of a lifetime deal, and how I cleaned it up.
Get the next MRR journey, post-mortem or day-in-the-life the moment it ships. No fluff, no growth-hacks, just the real numbers.
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