Ida's $4.5K MRR

Hey - It’s Guy & Farzan,

For the past week, I (Guy) have been sitting in Bali enjoying some time with my youngest daughter, Luna. We’ve been working away and resting up. She’s in her final year of school, and I’ve been working on Founderoo and Testimonial Donut. It’s been such a joy to hang out with her and get some sun on my back. Enough of that. Let’s get into it.

Today, we have:
2 founder stories,
1 founder playbook,
1 founder post,
1 founder freebie

Estimated reading time: 8 mins

Founder story 1

See how Ida’s business ‘Playground’ is tackling procrastination and has reached $4.5K MRR.

See how Ida has:

💵 Reached $4.5K monthly recurring revenue.
🚀 Bootstrapped the business to 1.2k monthly visitors.
👥 Offers innovative 'future-of-work' experiences.
📈 Conducted pilot testing to refine and improve products.
🌐 Used networking and community engagement for growth.

Our top 5 takeaways from Ida’s story

👉 Embrace playfulness and connection in business.
👉 Leverage personal networks and communities for initial growth.
👉 Conduct thorough pilot testing to validate and improve offerings.
👉 Focus on creating meaningful and memorable experiences.
👉 Use automation and organizational tools for efficiency.

"Present over perfect." Ida’s journey demonstrates the power of playfulness and human connection.

Founder story 2

See how Vince hit $1.2M in revenue with his bike-sharing platform Joyride.

A Toronto cyclist created Joyride to track his bike and prevent theft using public Wi-Fi. This innovation became a bike-sharing and rental solution, later expanding to scooters and other mobility services. Joyride now supports businesses globally with integrated hardware and software, is used by millions, and helps reduce greenhouse gases. The founder's journey underscores the value of passion and perseverance in entrepreneurship.

 Founder playbook

The remarkable story of Reddit's growth to 73 million daily users and $80M revenue in 2023.

See how Steve, Alexis and Aaron have:

💵 Got to a $15B valuation post-IPO in December 2021.
🚀 Bootstrapped from a college project to a global phenomenon.
👥 Served 73.1 million daily users worldwide.
📈 Ranked as the world's 18th most popular website.
🌐 Continually evolving with a community-centric approach.

Our top 5 takeaways from Reddit’s journey:

👉 Find gaps in the digital landscape and build solutions to address them.
👉 Leverage influential mentorship and adapt based on feedback.
👉 Focus on building a robust and user-driven community.
👉 Continuously innovate while staying true to core principles.
👉 Balance user experience with sustainable revenue models.

"We don’t like your idea, but we like you." Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian's journey from a rejected pitch to creating Reddit.

Founder post

David Hieatt (founder of Hiut Denim) brings us a wise nugget about growing your business.

“We got lucky. We could never grow.

100 people can attend the annual Do Lectures in a cowshed in West Wales.
That’s all folks.

Our only option for growth was to mean more to our attendees.

To make them laugh more.
Dance more.
Smile more.

To give them hope.
To inspire them.
To help look at the world different.

Our constraint turned out to be a magical one.

Don’t lose yourself to scale.
Don’t mean less to more people.

There is another way.”

Founder freebie

🔥 200+ Real pitch deck examples 🔥

Why should you invent the wheel over and over again as a founder with your pitch deck?

A Founderoo friend, Maximilian Fleitmann, has collected over 200 real pitch decks from companies like Airbnb, Snapchat, Dropbox, Wunderlist, and more. He's letting us share them with you. You can learn so much from them for your own pitch deck.

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See you next Sunday.

Guy + Farzan
Founderoo