Blinkstore's $250K revenue

Hey - It’s Guy & Farzan,

As I write this (Guy here), I’m sitting at the Gold Coast Airport, about to fly to Bali with my daughter Luna. Can’t wait. It’s been bloody chilly in Sydney the past month. Enough chit-chat. Let’s get into it.

Today, we have:
2 founder stories,
1 founder playbook,
and 1 founder post.

Estimated reading time: 9 mins

Founder story 1

See how Rajat, Mofid, and Madhurendra's business, Blinsktore, went from zero to $250K ARR and over 1.1 million monthly visitors.

See how Rajat, Mofid & Madhurendra Sachan Have:

💵 Grown Blinkstore to $250K ARR.
🚀 Bootstrapped their business from zero to over a million monthly visitors.
👥 Enabled 70,000+ sellers to launch their own merchandise.
📈 Reached 72K subscribers and built a booming community.
🌐 Accelerated how content creators/influencers monetize their brands.

Our top 5 takeaways from this story

👉 Identify gaps in the market and build solutions to address them.
👉 Leverage organic growth channels like SEO and social media.
👉 Focus on customer feedback to refine and improve the product.
👉 Use a lean and frugal approach to manage expenses and sustain growth.
👉 Embrace innovation and expand globally to reach a broader audience.

"Stop thinking and start doing."

Rajat, Mofid, and Madhurendra's journey shows the power of innovation combined with strategic marketing. We also love the business name; it has a nice ring to it.

Founder story 2

See how Marcos built a $1M a year ghostwriting business.

Marcos (an introvert) built a successful ghostwriting business called Birdhouse in just two years, earning $65,000 per month. He focused on creating Twitter content for coaches and consultants. He used testimonials and sent hundreds of daily direct messages to grow his client base. Marcos's story shows that with consistency, strategic planning, and dedication, anyone can achieve cracking results. Not easy, but doable.

 Founder playbook

From college experiment to media empire: The rise of Morning Brew to 4 Million subscribers and $50 Million in revenue.

From college experiment to media empire: The rise of Morning Brew to 4 Million subscribers and $50 Million in revenue.

💵 Grown Morning Brew to $50 Million in Revenue.
🚀 Bootstrapped their business to 4 Million Subscribers.
👥 Sold a Majority Stake for $75 Million in 2020.
📈 Built a distinctive voice resonating with millennials.
🌐 Expanded from a newsletter to a multimedia business entity.

My top 5 takeaways from their story 

👉 Find gaps in the market with innovative solutions.
👉 Leverage referral programs and community engagement for growth.
👉 Hire strategically for the future, not just the present.
👉 Use a unique, relatable tone to build a loyal audience.
👉 Expand into multiple media platforms to diversify content delivery.

"Transforming business news for young professionals."

Morning Brew's journey shows how bloody important innovation, strategic hiring, and community building have been for them to go big. This is a nuts story.

Founder post

Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist. Here’s a LinkedIn post of his a few days ago that we loved.

Todoist has made more than $100 million in total revenue, which isn't very interesting because many others have reached this number. What's interesting is that we did it in our unique way:

• Fully bootstrapped. Customers have supported us since the beginning, and we've used only our revenues to improve things further.

• Complete independence. Since we are customer-supported, no one tells us what we can or can't do.

• Remote-first. But not only remote-first, we've hired super talented people worldwide who never went to Ivy League schools or worked at Google. Many of the early people who joined Doist have seen a 10x increase in compensation as we've scaled Doist.

• Europe mixed with US mentality. We've achieved this by working 40-hour workweeks and taking 40 days of vacation per year. We only work on weekdays. The three-member CXO team has 8 kids, and we got them while we scaled Doist.

The most critical personal lesson I've learned is that you can do much more than you think. I came from a refugee background and started a real school in the 4th grade. Starting and running a tech company was not even plausible while growing up. But here we are! So start learning, growing, and building! You got this.

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See you next Sunday.

Guy + Farzan
Founderoo