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23 posts tagged.
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 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.
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.
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.
Baremetrics made its revenue public for years, then sold to Xenon Partners for $4M cash in 2020. The real numbers behind the exit, and why the transparency pioneer walked away.
Balsamiq's founder publishes exact revenue every year: $6.58M in 2024, down on purpose. The real number, the 2008 arc, and why data brokers get it wrong.
Carrd founder AJ confirmed about $100K MRR and $1.2M ARR on The SaaS Podcast, then went quiet. The real revenue number, the $2M raise he took anyway, and why a $19-per-year, one-person business staying flat is the whole point.
A bootstrapped founder's honest ledger to her first $1,000/month in 2026: 35 customers at $29, why she waited too long to charge, and why ads returned almost nothing.
ConvertKit was three months from dying at $1,337/mo. The bootstrapped playbook Nathan Barry used to reach $29M ARR, every figure sourced.
Testimonial.to revenue hit $800K ARR bootstrapped by one founder, out-earning his AI product PDF.ai four to one. Damon Chen's real numbers, and the lesson for 2026.
Tally reached $4.3M ARR in 2025, bootstrapped, by giving unlimited forms away free and charging just 2% of users. Why free is the growth engine, not the discount.
