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Stories

In-depth founder interviews, MRR journeys and post-mortems, with the real numbers.

142 posts

Founder narrative

The month I sent a DMCA takedown notice at $48K MRR: a founder diary (2026)

A composite founder diary (2026): at $48K MRR a competitor cloned eleven of the fourteen sentences on my landing page, comma splice included. A DMCA takedown notice got the page down in six days, and a counter notification put it back on the table on day nineteen. Why the CDN was the wrong recipient, why copying expression is actionable when copying features is not, and the arithmetic nobody publishes: ten to fourteen business days to file a lawsuit against a copyright registration that was averaging about four months.

10 min read71
MRR journey

Scoro Turned Its First Profit in 2025. Its Cash Fell 64% in the Same Year.

Scoro's filed revenue ran EUR 10.43M (2022) to EUR 16.62M (2025) and the group booked its first ever profit in 2025, EUR 374,000. The Estonian and UK filings reconcile to the euro, the register leaves the profit cell blank, the UK copy is an unreadable scan, and both aggregators on page one are high by 20% to 30%.

11 min read102
MRR journey

Pipedrive's Profit Fell 45% in the Year It Generated EUR 52M of Cash

Pipedrive OU's audited revenue ran EUR 160.42M (2022) to EUR 236.80M (2025) while net profit fell from EUR 46.53M to EUR 25.62M. The Estonian filings show the profit drop is mostly a first-ever dividend tax, that 2024's record profit year burned EUR 28.9M of cash, and that the famous 2022 growth spike was a transfer pricing change.

11 min read99
Founder narrative

The month an SLA breach cost me $240 at $47K MRR: a founder diary (2026)

A composite founder diary (2026): at $47K MRR an enterprise customer's procurement team invoked section 8.2 and claimed a service credit for 47 minutes of downtime. Why their number and my number were different lengths and theirs was the one that counted, why the same 42 minute outage breaches in February and clears in July, why the $240 credit was a seventeenth of what the month cost, and the three clauses the large published SLAs carry that mine did not.

9 min read75
MRR journey

Toggl Has Grown Revenue for 18 Straight Years. Its Profit Just Fell 57%.

Toggl OU's audited revenue ran EUR 14.99M (2022) to EUR 18.03M (2025) while net profit fell from EUR 3.25M to EUR 1.39M. The Estonian filings show why that profit drop is an accounting artefact, why all of 2025's growth came from a line that is not the app, and why the three aggregators on page one are out by up to 17x.

10 min read122
Founder narrative

The month a website accessibility lawsuit threat landed at $45K MRR: a founder diary (2026)

A composite founder diary (2026): at $45K MRR a twelve page ADA demand letter arrived by certified mail alleging eleven barriers and giving fourteen days to respond. Why a demand letter is not a website accessibility lawsuit and what that changes, why the published filing counts of 3,117 and 4,928 describe a category I was not in, the overlay widget I nearly bought at 11pm, the nine defects behind the eleven allegations, and what the whole month actually cost.

12 min read78
MRR journey

Mullvad Has Not Raised Its Price Since 2009. Revenue Grew 7.7x Anyway.

Mullvad VPN AB's audited turnover ran SEK 40.7M (2020) to SEK 314.8M (2024), a 7.7x rise on a price that has not moved since 2009. The Swedish filings also show why page-one aggregators are out by a factor of eight, and what happened after the company removed recurring subscriptions in June 2022.

12 min read129
Founder narrative

The month a data subject access request landed in my support inbox at $43K MRR: a founder diary (2026)

A composite founder diary (2026): at $43K MRR a sixteen-word email asking for "everything you have on me" turned out to be a valid data subject access request with a one month deadline that had already been running for nine days. What Article 15 actually requires, the eleven systems holding the data, why nine of the fourteen hours went on redaction rather than export, and the one scoping lever in Recital 63 that halved the work.

12 min read99
Founder narrative

The month Gmail sent my password resets to spam at $39K MRR: a founder diary (2026)

A composite founder diary (2026): at $39K MRR my password resets, receipts and failed-payment notices quietly started landing in spam. The cause was one launch email sent to 6,240 people in a single afternoon, which pushed me over the 5,000-messages-per-day line where Gmail and Outlook both apply strict bulk sender rules. Why 22 complaints was enough, why Google Postmaster Tools shows a solo operator nothing until the day they break something, and what the fix actually cost.

10 min read121
MRR journey

Valve's 336 Staff Did Not Make $50 Million Each. The Real Number Is a Quarter of That.

Games on Steam grossed roughly $5.5B (2017), ~$15.4B (2024), ~$17B to ~$20B (2025) and $11.1B in H1 2026 alone. Valve's own revenue was $4B+ from Steam (2025), ~$5B (2023) and ~$2.21B (2021). A source-typed ledger separating storefront volume from what Valve keeps, why the viral $50 million per employee figure is wrong by roughly four times, and what 79 people running Steam actually tells operators.

11 min read265