Flash Startups

Evan You started Vue as a side experiment while working as a creative technologist at Google, then open sourced it in February 2014 after about six months of private development. A Hacker News launch and steady developer word of mouth grew it into one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with the project now funded by roughly 232 Patreon donors giving $16,547 per month. Evan has never directly sold the software, relying instead on sponsorships and a product he kept improving.

Balsamiq Wireframes is a bootstrapped SaaS tool for wireframing and mockups founded by Peldi in 2008. Starting with $165,000 in revenue in the first six months, it grew to ~3,000 customers in eight months and now generates approximately $6M in annual recurring revenue. The company succeeded through word-of-mouth marketing, viral product design (the distinctive sketchy wireframe aesthetic), and blogger partnerships for SEO, without traditional paid marketing.

OMG Pop was a Flash-based gaming website that struggled against competitors like Farmville, facing shutdown with only 4-5 months of runway left. Dan Porter designed Draw Something, a simple drawing and guessing game with playback functionality, as a last-ditch effort. The game exploded virally, reaching 1 million downloads in 9 days and 50 million in 50 days, ultimately being downloaded 250 million times before Zynga acquired it for $200 million just six weeks after launch.