Browse Case Studies

Hot or Not launched in 2000 as a simple photo-rating site and became one of the first viral web products, reaching 30,000+ IP addresses on day one and becoming a top-20 most trafficked website within two months. The founders stumbled into a sustainable freemium business model (converting 5-20% of users to paid dating features) that generated $10,000-$20,000+ daily revenue by the early 2000s, ultimately scaling to $6M in annual earnings before selling around 2008.

Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author and entrepreneur who has built multiple businesses around stoic philosophy and parenting advice. His most notable venture is the Momentum Coin—a high-margin, low-complexity physical product inspired by stoic philosophy that sells tens of thousands of units annually. He operates Daily Stoic (400K subscribers) and Daily Dad (60K subscribers) as free email newsletters, leveraging content marketing and social media to drive organic growth across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms.

OMG Pop was a Flash-based gaming website that struggled against competitors like Farmville, facing shutdown with only 4-5 months of runway left. Dan Porter designed Draw Something, a simple drawing and guessing game with playback functionality, as a last-ditch effort. The game exploded virally, reaching 1 million downloads in 9 days and 50 million in 50 days, ultimately being downloaded 250 million times before Zynga acquired it for $200 million just six weeks after launch.