Investing in ambitious founders.
Austin, NYC, SF
Joined March 2009
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- Following1.2K
- Followers65.7K
- Likes16.3K
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Today we raised $145m to fund bootstrappers here on Twitter!
Get up to $3m in non-dilutive capital overnight from @FounderpathHQ
Figured I'd prove it by wiring a bunch of you today.
Tag the bootstrapped SaaS founder you admire most below...
❤️My favorites:
🧵A thread 👇
Nathan Latka retweeted
In my 20’s, I used to work on Wall Street.
People my age now (45) said they were working 70, 80, 90 hours a week for their families…but all their families actually wanted was their presence.
They didn’t understand why their families resented how much they worked when they lived in a nice house, and their kids went to private schools.
It was just the world we all lived in. We knew nothing else.
I decided early in my startup journey that wasn’t going to be me.
My co-founders and I have always had a policy of quitting at 5 or 5:30.
By that, I mean:
> Shut off my laptop
> No more work talk
> Go home to my family
Frequently I’m out even earlier - 3-5, depending on whether I want to do something with the kids.
I rarely travel for work and don’t entertain for work.
My family life gives me energy for my work.
My work gives me energy for my family life.
I'm trying to stay not burnt out and excited about this for several decades.
Can every founder choose this?
Maybe not everybody, but more people have the choice than realize they do.
There is great reward that comes from designing a business around the life you want.
Nathan Latka retweeted
We lost one of the greats of the bootstrapped software world.
Adam Robinson was so inspiring to follow in his journey to build Retention, RB2B, and MoltSets in public. There aren't many people who bootstrap a company to $10M+ like he did, let alone to do it in public.
Last time we were together in Miami he teased me that my Web App Challenge was so inspirational to him, but that he wished I posted more. So he'd ask himself, "What do I wish Nathan shared?" Then write that.
I loved his public posts, lessons learned, and the way he ran the podcast. He was also so generous with his data and legal knowledge as we launched Subscriber Signals at Kit.
Adam, thank you for the generosity in every interaction. You inspired me and thousands of other founders. You'll be dearly missed.
Rest in peace.
Revenue doesn't lie
He made $60k in rent last night.
This is the new AirBNB.
Avg stay 9 months.
Longer than AirBnB
Shorter than typical lease.
New market: Mid term lease
On the Top Founders Podcast, @padsplit CEO @atticusleblanc shares:
It’s great for renters:
(03:05) 34k rooms available
(04:18) Under $30/night avg
(03:46) Furnished, utilities incl
It’s great for real estate owners:
(07:11) Very low vacancy
(06:25) 74% fill rate
...and it’s great for PadSplit:
(08:43) $250M in rent annually
(07:49) $20M PadSplit revenue
(02:25) No balance sheet risk
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
He made $60k in rent last night.
This is the new AirBNB.
Avg stay 9 months.
Longer than AirBnB
Shorter than typical lease.
New market: Mid term lease
On the Top Founders Podcast, @padsplit CEO @atticusleblanc shares:
It’s great for renters:
(03:05) 34k rooms available
(04:18) Under $30/night avg
(03:46) Furnished, utilities incl
It’s great for real estate owners:
(07:11) Very low vacancy
(06:25) 74% fill rate
...and it’s great for PadSplit:
(08:43) $250M in rent annually
(07:49) $20M PadSplit revenue
(02:25) No balance sheet risk
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
Insane.
“ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit," $200m ARR CEO of @airSlate
In Vadim's first ever public interview on Top Founders podcast, he shares:
Financial data
(03:40) DocHub $22M, pdfFiller $106M, signNow $35M
(03:52) “This page does $106M of revenue”
(03:57) 866,000 paying customers on one product
(04:35) 85,000 forms hand-built by lawyers
(07:16) 2x ARR but Valuation down $1b to $800m
(07:35) $100M revenue at last round. Now $200M
(08:19) 2015: GC money, bought signNow, hit $50M
(08:42) $18M revenue in 2013–2014
(09:10) “pdfFiller was a cash machine”
(10:51) 1.1M paying customers, 866,000 on pdfFiller
(11:04) 1.1M customers ÷ $200M = $180/year each
(18:30) $200M ARR on <$200M equity raised
Growth tactics
(01:23) No “AI” branding
(01:53) Why acquired brands keep their own names
(04:58) Unannounced AI product
(05:35) 85,000 lawyer-built forms. Why he’s not Harvey
(07:55) “Customers build their own software? Baloney.”
(08:54) Bought signNow at $3M. Now $35M
(11:26) 4.8 billion keywords managed
(11:30) 35 million SEO pages built
(12:33) Contextual relevance vs programmatic SEO
(12:50) 4.8B keywords. “Very few are productive.”
(13:07) Search influence drops from 80% to 30%
(13:30) Keyword-volume SEO dead in 9–12 months
(14:27) “ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit.”
(14:55) “Our competition was not sophisticated”
(15:05) Superior PPC bidding math. Now everyone has it
(16:31) Vertical vs horizontal: the NDR fight
Fundraising, M&A
(06:43) $150M raised total, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley
(07:03) June 2022: $52M at a $1.25B valuation
(07:45) “My VC friends don’t understand”
(08:35) Raised first money at $8.5M revenue
(09:21) The no-board, no-VC golden years
(09:37) “Get money as late as you possibly can”
(17:26) Running the Bending Spoons playbook
(17:37) M&A rule: $1M products “not interesting.”
(17:56) How he handles a real board
(18:40) “Some raised $20 for every $1 of ARR. Not us.”
(18:46) “VC objectives and mine are slightly different”
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
Nathan Latka retweeted
if you're a founder looking to tell your story to other founders, there is no better spot than the TOP Founders podcast!
a VERY smart and sophisticated audience of founders/investors
if you're a founder looking to tell your story to other founders, there is no better spot than the TOP Founders podcast!
a VERY smart and sophisticated audience of founders/investors
👀
“ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit," $200m ARR CEO of @airSlate
In Vadim's first ever public interview on Top Founders podcast, he shares:
Financial data
(03:40) DocHub $22M, pdfFiller $106M, signNow $35M
(03:52) “This page does $106M of revenue”
(03:57) 866,000 paying customers on one product
(04:35) 85,000 forms hand-built by lawyers
(07:16) 2x ARR but Valuation down $1b to $800m
(07:35) $100M revenue at last round. Now $200M
(08:19) 2015: GC money, bought signNow, hit $50M
(08:42) $18M revenue in 2013–2014
(09:10) “pdfFiller was a cash machine”
(10:51) 1.1M paying customers, 866,000 on pdfFiller
(11:04) 1.1M customers ÷ $200M = $180/year each
(18:30) $200M ARR on <$200M equity raised
Growth tactics
(01:23) No “AI” branding
(01:53) Why acquired brands keep their own names
(04:58) Unannounced AI product
(05:35) 85,000 lawyer-built forms. Why he’s not Harvey
(07:55) “Customers build their own software? Baloney.”
(08:54) Bought signNow at $3M. Now $35M
(11:26) 4.8 billion keywords managed
(11:30) 35 million SEO pages built
(12:33) Contextual relevance vs programmatic SEO
(12:50) 4.8B keywords. “Very few are productive.”
(13:07) Search influence drops from 80% to 30%
(13:30) Keyword-volume SEO dead in 9–12 months
(14:27) “ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit.”
(14:55) “Our competition was not sophisticated”
(15:05) Superior PPC bidding math. Now everyone has it
(16:31) Vertical vs horizontal: the NDR fight
Fundraising, M&A
(06:43) $150M raised total, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley
(07:03) June 2022: $52M at a $1.25B valuation
(07:45) “My VC friends don’t understand”
(08:35) Raised first money at $8.5M revenue
(09:21) The no-board, no-VC golden years
(09:37) “Get money as late as you possibly can”
(17:26) Running the Bending Spoons playbook
(17:37) M&A rule: $1M products “not interesting.”
(17:56) How he handles a real board
(18:40) “Some raised $20 for every $1 of ARR. Not us.”
(18:46) “VC objectives and mine are slightly different”
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
Nathan Latka retweeted
$200M ARR from SEO. The SEO-on-steroids playbook behind airSlate:
1/ They run one of the biggest SEO machines on the internet
-> 4.8B keywords tracked and 35M pages built over the years: a page for every form, tool and city, even "compress PNG from 17MB to 15MB", in 7+ languages
-> PDFfiller even ranks #1 on Google for "fake marriage certificate"
2/ They buy companies, put their SEO machine behind them and grow revenue 10x
-> signNow made ~$3M a year when they bought it, paying only $2M in cash. Now it makes $35M
-> Every company keeps its own name and team, and shares only marketing, payments and DevOps
3/ They sell to 31M tiny US businesses
-> The plumber, the baker, the bookstore owner. 1.1M of them pay ~$180 a year each
4/ One simple page makes $106M a year
-> PDFfiller, a site where you edit and sign PDFs, has ~860K paying customers on its own
5/ A free AI product built only to pull traffic
-> bizdraft . com writes a legal agreement in 90 seconds with no sign-up, then sends people to their paid tools
6/ Even they think mass SEO is about to end
-> The CEO gives keyword SEO 9-12 more months and expects search to drive 30% of new customers instead of 80%. On ChatGPT SEO gurus: "It's bullshit"
7/ They copy Google's search suggestions and make a page for each one
-> Type "rental agreement" into Google and it suggests "rental agreement for a room in Texas"
-> Their US Legal Forms site makes a page with that exact title, so it matches exactly what people search. They have ~120K of these pages
8/ 37,000 "DocHub vs X" comparison pages
-> One for almost every competitor on earth, even tools nobody has heard of
-> Plus 41 websites named after exact searches, like merge-pdf.dochub [.] com and chat-with-pdf.dochub [.] com
9/ They also run one of the most advanced Google Ads strategies out there
-> 60M keywords, zero salespeople, and bidding math so good that a new customer's first payment already covered what the ad cost
10/ One product paid for everything
-> PDFfiller was "a cash machine". They hit $18M revenue before raising, and reached $200M ARR on less than $200M raised
Prepared by growth hackers at Ryze AI, the AI agent for paid ads
“ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit," $200m ARR CEO of @airSlate
In Vadim's first ever public interview on Top Founders podcast, he shares:
Financial data
(03:40) DocHub $22M, pdfFiller $106M, signNow $35M
(03:52) “This page does $106M of revenue”
(03:57) 866,000 paying customers on one product
(04:35) 85,000 forms hand-built by lawyers
(07:16) 2x ARR but Valuation down $1b to $800m
(07:35) $100M revenue at last round. Now $200M
(08:19) 2015: GC money, bought signNow, hit $50M
(08:42) $18M revenue in 2013–2014
(09:10) “pdfFiller was a cash machine”
(10:51) 1.1M paying customers, 866,000 on pdfFiller
(11:04) 1.1M customers ÷ $200M = $180/year each
(18:30) $200M ARR on <$200M equity raised
Growth tactics
(01:23) No “AI” branding
(01:53) Why acquired brands keep their own names
(04:58) Unannounced AI product
(05:35) 85,000 lawyer-built forms. Why he’s not Harvey
(07:55) “Customers build their own software? Baloney.”
(08:54) Bought signNow at $3M. Now $35M
(11:26) 4.8 billion keywords managed
(11:30) 35 million SEO pages built
(12:33) Contextual relevance vs programmatic SEO
(12:50) 4.8B keywords. “Very few are productive.”
(13:07) Search influence drops from 80% to 30%
(13:30) Keyword-volume SEO dead in 9–12 months
(14:27) “ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit.”
(14:55) “Our competition was not sophisticated”
(15:05) Superior PPC bidding math. Now everyone has it
(16:31) Vertical vs horizontal: the NDR fight
Fundraising, M&A
(06:43) $150M raised total, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley
(07:03) June 2022: $52M at a $1.25B valuation
(07:45) “My VC friends don’t understand”
(08:35) Raised first money at $8.5M revenue
(09:21) The no-board, no-VC golden years
(09:37) “Get money as late as you possibly can”
(17:26) Running the Bending Spoons playbook
(17:37) M&A rule: $1M products “not interesting.”
(17:56) How he handles a real board
(18:40) “Some raised $20 for every $1 of ARR. Not us.”
(18:46) “VC objectives and mine are slightly different”
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
hard to grow 100% on such a huge base ($100m ARR)
“ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit," $200m ARR CEO of @airSlate
In Vadim's first ever public interview on Top Founders podcast, he shares:
Financial data
(03:40) DocHub $22M, pdfFiller $106M, signNow $35M
(03:52) “This page does $106M of revenue”
(03:57) 866,000 paying customers on one product
(04:35) 85,000 forms hand-built by lawyers
(07:16) 2x ARR but Valuation down $1b to $800m
(07:35) $100M revenue at last round. Now $200M
(08:19) 2015: GC money, bought signNow, hit $50M
(08:42) $18M revenue in 2013–2014
(09:10) “pdfFiller was a cash machine”
(10:51) 1.1M paying customers, 866,000 on pdfFiller
(11:04) 1.1M customers ÷ $200M = $180/year each
(18:30) $200M ARR on <$200M equity raised
Growth tactics
(01:23) No “AI” branding
(01:53) Why acquired brands keep their own names
(04:58) Unannounced AI product
(05:35) 85,000 lawyer-built forms. Why he’s not Harvey
(07:55) “Customers build their own software? Baloney.”
(08:54) Bought signNow at $3M. Now $35M
(11:26) 4.8 billion keywords managed
(11:30) 35 million SEO pages built
(12:33) Contextual relevance vs programmatic SEO
(12:50) 4.8B keywords. “Very few are productive.”
(13:07) Search influence drops from 80% to 30%
(13:30) Keyword-volume SEO dead in 9–12 months
(14:27) “ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit.”
(14:55) “Our competition was not sophisticated”
(15:05) Superior PPC bidding math. Now everyone has it
(16:31) Vertical vs horizontal: the NDR fight
Fundraising, M&A
(06:43) $150M raised total, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley
(07:03) June 2022: $52M at a $1.25B valuation
(07:45) “My VC friends don’t understand”
(08:35) Raised first money at $8.5M revenue
(09:21) The no-board, no-VC golden years
(09:37) “Get money as late as you possibly can”
(17:26) Running the Bending Spoons playbook
(17:37) M&A rule: $1M products “not interesting.”
(17:56) How he handles a real board
(18:40) “Some raised $20 for every $1 of ARR. Not us.”
(18:46) “VC objectives and mine are slightly different”
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
“ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit," $200m ARR CEO of @airSlate
In Vadim's first ever public interview on Top Founders podcast, he shares:
Financial data
(03:40) DocHub $22M, pdfFiller $106M, signNow $35M
(03:52) “This page does $106M of revenue”
(03:57) 866,000 paying customers on one product
(04:35) 85,000 forms hand-built by lawyers
(07:16) 2x ARR but Valuation down $1b to $800m
(07:35) $100M revenue at last round. Now $200M
(08:19) 2015: GC money, bought signNow, hit $50M
(08:42) $18M revenue in 2013–2014
(09:10) “pdfFiller was a cash machine”
(10:51) 1.1M paying customers, 866,000 on pdfFiller
(11:04) 1.1M customers ÷ $200M = $180/year each
(18:30) $200M ARR on <$200M equity raised
Growth tactics
(01:23) No “AI” branding
(01:53) Why acquired brands keep their own names
(04:58) Unannounced AI product
(05:35) 85,000 lawyer-built forms. Why he’s not Harvey
(07:55) “Customers build their own software? Baloney.”
(08:54) Bought signNow at $3M. Now $35M
(11:26) 4.8 billion keywords managed
(11:30) 35 million SEO pages built
(12:33) Contextual relevance vs programmatic SEO
(12:50) 4.8B keywords. “Very few are productive.”
(13:07) Search influence drops from 80% to 30%
(13:30) Keyword-volume SEO dead in 9–12 months
(14:27) “ChatGPT SEO gurus? It’s bullshit.”
(14:55) “Our competition was not sophisticated”
(15:05) Superior PPC bidding math. Now everyone has it
(16:31) Vertical vs horizontal: the NDR fight
Fundraising, M&A
(06:43) $150M raised total, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley
(07:03) June 2022: $52M at a $1.25B valuation
(07:45) “My VC friends don’t understand”
(08:35) Raised first money at $8.5M revenue
(09:21) The no-board, no-VC golden years
(09:37) “Get money as late as you possibly can”
(17:26) Running the Bending Spoons playbook
(17:37) M&A rule: $1M products “not interesting.”
(17:56) How he handles a real board
(18:40) “Some raised $20 for every $1 of ARR. Not us.”
(18:46) “VC objectives and mine are slightly different”
Available today wherever you get your podcasts.
Nathan Latka retweeted
Founders - if you're considering building your own Model, this is a must listen.
CEO @Jiajun3423 (Jeff) of @AkoolInc put on a masterclass:
> Spends $1m/mo on training.
> Broke $36m ARR in June this year.
> Users producing 500k images/vids per day
Proves you don't have to raise $1b (he's only raised about $10m!)
My full Top Founders Podcast interview with Jeff:
(04:38) $25m revenue in 2025, targeting $60m in 2026
(05:34) Over $3m revenue in a single month
(08:28) First 100 customers: slow enterprise sales → self-serve payments
(08:53) 210,000 organic clicks per month
(10:46) Stuck at $100k revenue in both 2021 and 2022
(11:19) Breaking through to $2m–$3m revenue in 2023
(11:56) Landing Coca-Cola after 3 months of testing
(12:34) Scaling to $12m–$13m revenue in 2024
(12:49) 60–70 employees, 40 engineers, $1m quotas for sales reps
(13:21) 20,000–30,000 paying customers, including hundreds of businesses
(13:55) One enterprise customer pays $4m per year
(15:18) Users generate 500,000 images, videos and other assets daily
(15:31) $10m raised across 4+ years
(15:51) $100m valuation two years earlier; later SAFEs priced higher
(16:29) Would he take a hypothetical $500m cash offer from Google?