Browse Case Studies

RevGenius is a community platform founded by a 15-year sales veteran at the start of the pandemic to connect sales, marketing, and RevOps professionals. The platform grew to 15,000 members in its first year through word-of-mouth and community-driven growth.

Colin Huggins is a classical pianist who performs on the streets of Washington Square Park in New York, earning approximately $100,000 annually through donations. Over nine years, he refined his performance strategy—from making $100-150 per day initially to rarely making less than $1,000 per day by understanding audience psychology, strategic music selection, and crowd dynamics. Beyond street performance, he works with the Reciprocity Foundation, writing songs for homeless youth in New York City.

Ignite the Drive is a content platform founded by Garrett Dunham, a serial entrepreneur and startup advisor from Silicon Valley, after his previous accelerator Pre-Backed shut down due to burnout and a failed enterprise deal. The site shares tips, tricks, and frameworks for entrepreneurial mental fortitude through blogging and a newsletter. Currently generating revenue in the hundreds of dollars, it operates as a labor of love rather than a primary revenue driver.

Results Junkies is Paul Singh's community-driven newsletter and platform that evolved from a blog into a weekly newsletter written during his time as an investor. It's not currently a business, but rather a passion project bringing together a couple thousand founders and investors in Slack and through meetups to discuss building businesses. Paul built this after exiting Disruption Corp to 1776 and spending 30 days traveling to startup hubs globally to understand how communities grow.

The Top is a daily 15-18 minute podcast hosted by Nathan Latka featuring entrepreneurs who are number one or two in their industries by revenue or customer base. The show focuses on extracting real numbers—revenue figures, marketing funnels, customer counts—and was inspired by gaps Nathan saw in shows like Entrepreneur on Fire, NPR/Harvard Business Review, and Tim Ferriss's podcast. Nathan built his first company, HEO, into a SaaS business generating $30k/month in the first three months with $2.5M in funding and 10,000+ paying customers.

Stig Broderson left a six-figure commodities trading career in 2011 to pursue teaching and creating The Investors Podcast, inspired by Warren Buffett's philosophy of living authentically. Co-hosted with a friend in Maryland, the podcast has become the number one podcast in the world in stock investing, ranking #1 in its category with 17 competitors tracked. The show operates on a free model with no monetization yet, as Stig focuses on building value and maintaining editorial integrity.

Whitson Gordon is editor-in-chief of How To Geek, having built his career from a 2009 internship at Lifehacker where he grew the publication from 4 million monthly uniques to 15 million. He attributes growth to a balance of quality content (50%) and effective marketing tactics (50%), emphasizing strong headlines, strategic linking, and multi-channel promotion. Now running How To Geek, he applies the same content-first philosophy while maintaining editorial independence from revenue operations.

Emerson Spartz is a viral media entrepreneur who started MuggleNet at age 12, growing it to 50 million monthly page views through link swaps, content curation, and recruiting a 120-person team. He later founded Dose, a data-driven content platform that now reaches 15 million unique monthly visitors and 27 million social followers with just 6 writers and 50 total employees by leveraging machine learning algorithms (Kepler, Dante, Lindell, Lovelace, Darwin) to predict viral content and optimize headlines and thumbnails. The company has raised $35 million and monetizes through programmatic advertising while building native advertising products for brands.

New Story is a nonprofit that transforms slums into sustainable communities by building homes for $6,000 each through a digital crowdfunding platform. In 17 months, Brett Hagler and his 6-person team generated over $3 million in donation revenue, built 4 communities with over 300 homes, and secured backing from philanthropist 'investor donors.' The company differentiates itself through radical transparency—donors see exact family profiles and know exactly where their money goes.

Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that adds enhanced data security to Bitcoin by protecting transaction confidentiality and preventing pattern analysis. Founded by Zouko Wilcoxie, it raised $3 million from Silicon Valley angels and launched as an independent blockchain in October 2016, quickly achieving global adoption with daily transaction volumes around $20 million across 15-20 international exchanges. The project has gained significant traction through mining accessibility worldwide and strategic partnerships including JP Morgan's blockchain security solution.

FreeConferenceCalled.com, founded by David Erickson in October 2001 with a $10 domain purchase, grew to become a dominant conferencing platform serving 40 million monthly users and processing 1 million conference calls per day. The company monetizes through terminating access fees from telecom carriers rather than charging end users, enabling completely free conferencing and achieving 100%+ profit margins in early years. Now at 140 employees and over $100 million in annual revenue, the company remains bootstrapped and debt-free, having rejected a $250 million acquisition offer.

GAIF is a micro private equity fund built by AI researcher Simon Gillett that invests in Amazon sellers. The fund operates ATEM, a free proprietary demand forecasting and analytics tool for Amazon merchants that uses the same technology as Amazon.com, serving as a warm lead generation engine. With $20M+ in capital raised, the fund has deployed capital into at least one acquisition (Territory, an industrial supplies brand) and tracks hundreds of thousands of SKUs worth nine figures in GMV annually.