Formatically

Duncan Hamra and his best friend Tyler, both 25, had been entrepreneurial since high school. They'd already built and sold a lawn mowing business for a contact list and equipment before they were teenagers. In 2013, while sitting in English class, their teacher mentioned that someone needed to make it easier to automatically format papers. With some money from their previous venture and newfound confidence, they decided this was the problem they'd solve. They heard about Upwork and Fiverr, thought "building a website couldn't be that hard," and hired someone to build it for them.

The founders started with the "Smart Passive Income" tech stack: Bluehost, WordPress, and virtual assistants. When they needed something more complex, they hired a college student in New York to build a JavaScript and PHP application. The developer created something "pixel perfect" from the PowerPoint mockups Duncan and Tyler made—just boxes and text, but it looked beautiful. What should have been straightforward became a grinding 5-year journey through multiple rebuilds, each costing around $2,000, with no guarantee the new version would work.

Growth came slowly through multiple channels. They started by talking to friends. Then they tried cold email outreach. They even wrote comments on web forums where people complained about citation tools. But the real growth lever was content marketing: they wrote how-to articles about formatting papers, which brought in SEO traffic. Over 6 years, Formatically reached 260,000 visitors—an impressive number on paper, but it didn't translate to revenue.

The content and SEO strategy worked; the monetization didn't. They managed to launch an essay formatting service that generated around $5,000 in revenue. They also added ads, which made $200-$300 over three years. In total, they spent around $10,000 on the project and never drew salaries. Duncan later realized the core problem: they'd chosen a solution before fully understanding if the problem was worth solving to enough people, and whether they had the skills and resources to solve it better than alternatives. "You have to have an idea that you can relate to and that you can solve well, but also has to be able to make money," he reflected.

Formatically never shut down officially—it still exists—but it was abandoned in favor of Memberstack. Duncan and Tyler entered a pitch competition with a completely different idea (they knew Formatically wouldn't win). When they won second place and got an office space, they worked on Formatically there but both independently had the same realization: they should try something new. Within three days of pretending to be an agency, they got their first Memberstack client. They decided to "try the new idea for a couple of weeks" and never looked back. Duncan still has optimistic thoughts about Formatically, hoping others might use it someday, but the lessons learned—about selecting solvable problems with real market demand, understanding your customers, and building the skills you need—became invaluable for their next venture.