Browse Case Studies

Celitech is an eSIM platform that helps travel and hospitality companies like Expedia monetize connectivity services for their customers. The company is targeting a $1.5M raise to scale their enterprise partnerships and expand their eSIM distribution network.

Swag.com is a corporate swag and merchandise platform acquired by CustomInk for over $20 million. The company is projected to do $60 million+ in annual revenue this year with 30% margins, demonstrating strong unit economics in the B2B merchandise space.

This startup offers a pay-per-scan model for vehicle inspection technology targeted at insurance companies to reduce fraud. The company has achieved $30k MRR by solving a specific pain point for insurers—automated vehicle damage assessment and verification.

DataLab is an agricultural SaaS company that charges farmers on a per-cow basis, reaching $15M in annual revenue. Their pricing model aligns customer value with usage, resulting in ACVs as high as $100,000 for large farming operations.

Checkr is a background screening SaaS company that has grown to a $5 billion valuation by implementing a usage-based pricing model. The company has leveraged data-driven operational improvements and incentive alignment to drive growth, as discussed by COO Lindsey Scrase in a SaaStr podcast interview.

Scalefusion is a mobile device management platform helping SMBs configure and secure employee devices without IT expertise. After 3 failed startup attempts, founder Harishanker Kannan leveraged his kiosk technology experience to build a simple, affordable solution that grew organically to $400k/month through SEO and customer support excellence.

Henry is a Latin American coding bootcamp that teaches software development for free and operates on an income-sharing agreement model, taking 15% of graduates' salaries up to a $4,000 cap. Founded by Martin Borchardt after his experience hiring for his FinTech startup Nubi, Henry validated its concept through a simple Wix site and Typeform, attracting 100 applicants on day one through organic social posts. After receiving $300K from Y Combinator in Summer 2020, the company aims to train over 100,000 developers by 2025, with 90% of job placements driven directly by Henry's efforts.

GawkBox was a platform enabling fans to donate to content creators by playing mobile games funded by publishers. Founded by Christopher Brownridge, the startup raised $4.4M and reached 500k users with $1M+ in revenue in just 2-3 years, but ultimately failed due to poor unit economics, misaligned incentives between its three customer types, and a strategic pivot away from its core YouTube success toward unproven live-streaming markets.

Eola is a management platform and marketplace for activity centers that automates booking, scheduling, and payment processing. Starting from a beta with 5 customers in 2018, the founders grew to £1M/mo through customer-centric content marketing, SEO, and referrals, nearly 5x-ing revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic by positioning their usage-based pricing model as ideal for businesses facing uncertainty.

Briq is an AI orchestration platform for construction and manufacturing that automates back-office work for enterprise customers. Founded by Bassem Hamdy (former Procore executive who scaled the company from $10M to $100M), Briq now does 8 figures in revenue by pioneering an unconventional enterprise sales approach: selling on vision and value before demos, never offering free POCs, and always charging from day one. Bassem's strategy of targeting CFOs instead of innovation teams and growing through disciplined land-and-expand has compressed typical enterprise sales cycles from 6-12 months to 9 days.

Stephanie Harbert and Rich Galdrakus built Binomial, a GPU-optimized image and texture compression product for game developers. Starting from burnout and consulting work, they discovered the product opportunity when a client requested compression software. After prototyping for 3-4 months while maintaining their networking and conference presence, Netflix's engineering team discovered their work through Rich's blog and became their first major customer, providing financial backing to complete the product. Today, as a lean two-person team, they negotiate seven-figure deals with major gaming companies.

Tremendous is a B2B payout and incentive platform that grew out of Gift Rocket, the founders' earlier consumer gifting startup. After realizing businesses were using Gift Rocket repeatedly for market research incentives and referral programs—unlike consumers with low retention—the team pivoted and focused on the B2B use case. Through direct sales to market research firms and other businesses, the company scaled to eight-figure annual revenue, remains profitable, and is fully founder-owned after buying back investor equity.

Sean built an ascending-clock second-price auction platform to resolve disputes over valuable new top-level domains (.app, .blog, .church, etc.) worth hundreds of millions. After 8 months of grueling direct outreach to reluctant tech giants, he convinced Google and other major companies to use the platform, which has since facilitated auctions exceeding $100 million per domain. The business model charges 4% commission on auction proceeds.

Vongole was a mobile app advertising network founded by Jack Smith that pioneered cost-per-install (CPI) pricing rather than traditional CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) metrics. The company discovered product-market fit in just two weeks by pivoting from an app store review aggregator after customer research revealed that app developers' biggest pain point was user acquisition. The company achieved hundreds of millions in revenue and sold for approximately $750 million.

ClaimCompass helps travelers automatically process flight disruption claims and receive compensation up to $700 per flight, taking a commission from successful cases. Founded in 2015 by Alexander Sumin and others, the company raised $200K from 500 Startups in October 2016 and grew 10x within months through aggressive paid advertising and a successful Product Hunt launch that generated 1,500 free leads.

Benja Commerce Network was a gamified mobile shopping app and shoppable media ad network that helped define the interactive advertising space. After initial traction from a Product Hunt launch, Andrew pivoted to an ad network model with promising unit economics, but cash flow challenges and fundraising rejection led him to make material financial misrepresentations to investors, ultimately resulting in SEC/FBI investigation, shutdown, and his conviction for securities fraud in 2020.

Cherry is a browser extension that helps accommodation businesses get direct bookings by showing customers better deals when they search on travel sites like Expedia and Booking.com. In four months, they onboarded nearly 1,000 partner properties across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, with plans to launch in the US with 20,000 properties by November. They charge hotels a performance fee of $10/month plus $0.79 per click, significantly cheaper than the 30% commissions charged by major OTAs.

Sulamon Ali founded Tiny Co in 2009 to create mobile games for the newly launched iPhone App Store. Their first game, Tap Resort, generated $500-600K in revenue in its first month through a partnership with mobile ad network Tapjoy. After raising $18M from Andreessen Horowitz (with Mark Andreessen joining the board), they scaled to $20M revenue in year one and $40M in year two, but hit a wall when Japanese mobile gaming competitors drove customer acquisition costs from $1 to $9, destroying their unit economics and leading to significant monthly losses.

Vungal was a mobile app advertising network founded by Jack Smith that pioneered cost-per-install (CPI) pricing instead of traditional CPM models. The company launched 12-18 months after the iPhone App Store opened, capturing perfect timing in a high-growth market. It sold for hundreds of millions in revenue with 60% margins for the company, making it one of the most profitable ad tech businesses.

Vongol was a mobile video ad network founded by Jack Smith that revolutionized app monetization by charging based on app installs rather than video impressions. Starting with mockup-driven cold outreach that generated ~$1M in developer commitments, the company scaled to ~$1M in daily revenue within seven years and sold for approximately $800M. The company's competitive advantage included proprietary iPhone screen recording capabilities and direct relationships with app developers.