Stories

How Tally Makes Money Giving Its Forms Away Free

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.

Marc Lou Sold the Shovel: How ShipFast Outearned His Startups

Marc Lou launched about twenty startups that mostly failed, then built ShipFast in a week and made $6,000 in 48 hours. A sourced look at how a Next.js boilerplate outearned everything he built for end users.

The $500K ChatGPT Wrapper: How Tony Dinh Shipped TypingMind Before It Was Ready

TypingMind launched five days after OpenAI opened the ChatGPT API and crossed $500,000 in revenue within a year. Here is what solo operators can copy from Tony Dinh's build-in-public playbook.

The $7,400 MRR SaaS She is Killing Anyway: a solo founder's diary (June 2026)

Naomi Tate built a quiet $7,400 MRR tool for solo bookkeepers, no paid ads, in 18 months. In June 2026 she sent the wind-down email. Not because she failed. Because her infra bill, her toddler, and her own client roster all added up to a different answer than the spreadsheet she started with.

I added Catalan to my SaaS and Barcelona conversions almost doubled. Italian flopped. A 60-day localization diary (June 2026)

First hire at $9,120 MRR: a SaaS founder's diary (2026)

A composite vertical-SaaS founder hit $9,120 MRR running entirely on four AI agents, then made her first paid hire in March 2026, not a developer, an operations contractor at $22/hr through Deel. The 60-day result: NPS +14, churn -1.2 pp, founder hours -11/wk. With the math, the agent she retired, and what she'd do the same.

How Inés Vargas got her first 100 paying customers in 90 days (and the $1,470 it cost her)

Inés Vargas, a solo founder in Bilbao, hit 100 paying customers in 90 days for $1,470 in total spend. The itemized cost breakdown, the LinkedIn voice-DM channel that beat cold email 27x, the pricing flip at customer 38, and the channel she'd skip if starting again. Told as told to Joaquín del Río, with the spreadsheet on the table.

Marta del Sol on hitting $4K MRR with three AI agents

Marta del Sol runs a one-person operations studio from Valencia and crossed $4,120 in MRR across nine clients, with three AI agents doing the delivery and a $612 monthly software bill. Here's the real arc: the underpricing she's embarrassed by, the month two clients churned at once, why her clients renew for the Friday report and not the robot, and the caveats she insisted we print next to every number.

Why we killed our SaaS at $12K MRR (a post-mortem)

Cadence reached $12,400 in MRR with 140 accounts and an up-and-to-the-right graph, then the founders shut it down on purpose. This is the post-mortem of the most dangerous number in startups: too much to walk away from, too little to live on. The retention they didn't track, the customer they optimized for and shouldn't have, the fork they took too late, and the unusually honest way they ended it.

From freelance to $50K MRR in 18 months: a day in the life

Tomás Iglesias turned six years of hourly freelancing into a productized service business doing $51K MRR with a team of five, and his hours dropped from 60+ to 45 a week while revenue doubled. A real Tuesday, with the numbers: the utilization metric he checks before coffee, the $28K over-hiring scare, why he still does every sales call himself, and the $13K of actual monthly profit hiding behind the headline.

A 90-day post-mortem of a failed AI app launch

The app worked. The demo hit 140,000 views and 412 people signed up on launch day. Ninety days later: 11 paying users, ~$209 MRR, and an $8,000 monthly burn. This is the boring middle where AI products actually die: the retention cliff the launch hid, the month spent building the wrong thing, the five user calls that came too late, and the specific trap of an AI demo that's too good to be true.