Startups Unplugged

Sheets & Giggles is a pun-based, eco-friendly bedding brand founded by Colin McIntosh that launched in May 2018 on Indiegogo. The company makes lyocell bed sheets from eucalyptus trees and achieved nearly $500K in revenue in their first 6 months with over 6,000 orders, now generating $200K monthly revenue.

140 Canvas was a failed startup that allowed users to create custom fake tweets and purchase them as canvas prints for £30. Despite getting 17,000 visitors from a successful YouTube influencer campaign, they only converted 20 sales, losing £145 total due to lack of market validation and a complicated user experience requiring customers to write their own tweets.

Adleaf Technologies was a 2013 startup that combined programming bootcamps with software solutions, training fresh engineers and delivering client work at low cost. Despite strong initial traction with 43 new admissions in one week from Facebook ads and recovering initial investment in two weeks, the company failed due to poor money management, seasonal dependency on college students, and partnership conflicts. The founder lost approximately $13,000 USD total.

DecaLab is a SaaS acquisition and operating company founded by Raj Sheth that buys profitable B2B SaaS businesses in the $1-3M ARR range and scales them to $10M+. The company acquired Fly Data in 2020 for approximately $500K ARR, turned it around with product rewrites and growth initiatives, and sold it for a 3x return in about 13 months. Sheth's strategy focuses on operational improvements, SEO, onboarding, support, and outbound sales rather than creating products from scratch.

Alex Thuma built SaaS Stock from a blog started in 2015 to a global conference business running events across five continents with up to 4,000 attendees. The first Dublin event in 2016 attracted 700 people through speaker credibility and email list conversion, generating 350k GBP in revenue. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Alex pivoted to online events within two weeks, launching SaaS Stock Remote which attracted 2,700 attendees and proved online events could be profitable.