A brother’s text message about Hillary Clinton recording a podcast doesn’t usually turn into a case study. But that’s exactly what happened with Riverside. I’ve watched a lot of companies…
Jack Conte spent three months and maxed out his credit cards on a music video that pulled in millions of views. It made him almost nothing. That’s not a failure…
Evan Williams had already reshaped how the internet communicates. Twice. Blogger gave anyone a printing press. Twitter compressed thought into a sprint. By 2012, he’d spotted the flaw in both.…
Tyler Denk had $2.50 in his bank account and $120,000 in student debt. He was living in his parents’ basement. Six years later, he’d built a company generating $15 million…
Eighteen years old, $800 in sales, and a business he’d been talking up for months. That was Christian Owens two months into Paddle. Most founders would have called that a…
A customer once emailed a struggling startup asking for help resizing a logo. That’s it. That’s the origin story of one of the most consequential companies in internet history. The…
Most marketing teams chase traffic. Ahrefs chased something harder: traffic that converts itself. That single distinction explains how a bootstrapped software company with no sales team and no venture funding…
Four founders couldn’t afford transit passes to their own investor meetings. That’s not a metaphor. That’s 2014, in a cramped house in Toronto’s Koreatown, building a workplace app called Pod…
Jason VandeBoom sold his car to buy a computer. That’s not a metaphor. It’s how ActiveCampaign started. Twenty-two years later, the company he built is worth $3 billion. No viral…
Most rebrands are cosmetic. This one wasn’t. When Sendinblue became Brevo in 2023, plenty of people assumed it was a naming exercise. I didn’t see it that way. I saw…