What Works for Startups Like Yours?

Privy is a freemium SaaS platform launched in January 2015 by Ben Jiboie to help e-commerce brands convert more website traffic into leads and sales through exit-intent offers and lifecycle email automation. The company achieved explosive growth by becoming the #1 marketing app on the Shopify App Store, reaching 5,000+ paying customers with $250k MRR and $3.1M ARR by the time of this interview. Growth doubled year-over-year through platform partnerships, strong product-market fit for SMB e-commerce, and exceptional customer support that drives organic reviews and trust.

Rails Autoscale is a Heroku add-on built by solo founder Adam McCrea that automatically scales Rails applications. Over three years of bootstrapped development, McCrea grew the product to 100+ active users and $300k ARR, while working on it as a side project. In Spring 2021, he joined TinySeed accelerator to address platform risk and experiment with new pricing models.

Chaser is a Slack-native project management tool that lets users delegate tasks to anyone via Slack or email without requiring them to be platform users. With 100 companies signed up over 16 weeks and 43% retention, the team (2 unpaid co-founders + 2 full-time contract developers) raised $120k ($100k pre-seed at $7M cap + $20k angels) and is focusing on growth and product-market fit before monetization.

First customers: Slack app directory and direct outreach

Nick Sonnenberg is a former Wall Street high-frequency trader who gave up a seven-figure salary to launch Calvin App, a productivity tool that helps users store 'someday' events and simplifies scheduling by showing overlapping free time without exposing full calendar details. Launched in public beta with ~400 monthly active users after being featured at Twitter's developer conference for innovative API integration, Calvin is pursuing a $750K funding round at a $6-8M pre-money valuation with plans to monetize through affiliate partnerships and brand integrations.

First customers: Featured at Twitter's developer conference for innovative use of Twitter Friend Finder API