Bootstrapping Fame to $10m ARR (currently $5.3m).
London, England
Joined April 2014
- Tweets21.6K
- Following4.6K
- Followers5.1K
- Likes29.7K
HubSpot lost 80% of its website traffic.
Revenue grew 19%.
Their CMO wrote a whole book about how they didn't die.
The answer is 3 things, idk why nobody is talking about this:
A podcast network
A creator programme
A YouTube network
90% of their content leads come from those now.
The blog, the famous one, the one every marketer on earth copied for a decade, 10% lol.
We see the same thing across 300+ B2B businesses at Fame:
1. Nobody is influenced by your brand anymore.
Nobody. Your logo has never once convinced anyone of anything.
They're influenced by people.
Then they go ask ChatGPT if the people were right.
2. The shortlist gets written in 4 places and you're in none of them.
The feed. A creator they follow mentions you.
A podcast they already listen to. The host introduces you.
Your own content. Their peers are in it with you.
The AI they ask. You show up in the answer because of the first 3.
That's it, that's the whole funnel now.
3. You are still spending 80% of budget on the dead stuff.
Ads, SEO, cold email.
Reply rates are 1.4%.
Organic clicks are down to 58%.
And the plan for next quarter is, let me check, more cold email.
4. HubSpot had 5 years and hundreds of marketers to figure this out.
You have a team of 4 and a board meeting in 3 weeks.
So we tore up everything we do at Fame and rebuilt it around the 4 stages:
- Noticed
- Heard
- Trusted
- Named
More coming, I have a lot to say about this and nobody can stop me.
7
8
430
I may have just started an olive oil biz.
Having lunch with the gfs Italian family, the olive oil is incredible.
UK olive oil is expensive and mostly rubbish.
A few hours later Persano was born.
Picked green, milled within 6 hours, 742mg/kg polyphenols, posted monthly.
Then I forgot about it.
Last week someone subscribed. Found us on ChatGPT.
I had to refund becos: child, dog, fiancée, day job.
Looking for a co-founder who speaks Italian.
Fingers crossed.
5
6
292
I might be about to run a pub.
It does £8-10k a week. That's £416-520k.
The mix has recently flipped from 70/30 to 50/50 food/drink.
Owner wants to charge £44k a year for rent.
I'll take a 6 month trial £26-35k.
5 year deal after, rent set on actual trade, stepping up as takings grow.
Rent that starts where the pub is and grows with it.
Started in hospitality washing up as a teenager.
Would love to end up running a pub.
Fingers crossed.
Agencies are so back.
2015-2019 was the golden age.
Slowed down...
Now AI and we're back.
Very bullish on agencies.
1
2
1,319
Fame just passed $5m ARR.
$0 raised
100% founder-owned
It's been brutal:
- 2015-2019: 15 startups. All failed
- December 2019: Started Fame (My former employer became our first client)
- August 2026: $5m ARR
No investors.
No office.
No permission slips.
Just:
- 70 people, fully remote, no HQ
- An early finish every Friday
- Judged on output, not hours
- 300+ shows and 10m+ downloads for brands like Canva, Ramp, Zendesk and Workday
- Fame OS, the software we built to run it all
The secret?
There isn't one.
I failed 15 times, learnt more, and stayed in the game.
If you're in the "nothing's working" phase right now, you're not doing it wrong.
Keep going.
Next stop: $10m.
Here's to the bootstrappers 🥂
FOUNDER WANTED
TLDR: I accidentally created an Italian olive oil brand, it has it's first customer, but I have no time.
Full story coming later...
6
5
572
Sorry to customer #1 that had to be refunded.
Here is the brand: persano.co.uk, and yes it needs some work 🤣
264
Everyone vibe codes to save money.
Wrong.
Vibe code to build the features no SaaS is allowed to ship.
Our outreach tool (The Machine) now sends calendar invites instead of follow-up emails.
Cheeky? Yes.
Illegal? No.
Working? 🤫
2
520
25m impressions on a single post.
24 months of obsession.
220k followers.
Today, the system behind LinkedIn’s fastest profile growth is going open-source (MIT License), the whole thing:
A feeder, a writer, a dashboard, a Chrome extension.
I haven’t been posting much recently as all 9.5 hours of my working day has been spent building all the software I’ve always wanted for Fame.
This weekend my partner went away and left me with our 15 month old who takes really long naps so I decided to distill the system into 21 files and 1,585 lines of code.
It's called Hacking LinkedIn, and it:
👉 Scans creators you trust every morning for inspiration
👉 Trains a writer on your past posts, so drafts sound like you, not ChatGPT
👉 A dashboard that plans three weeks whole week of content in one view
👉 A Chrome extension that saves any post, straight from LinkedIn
👉 Auto-drafts everything into Google Docs, ready for you to edit (important)
👉 Scans an image library and suggests the best pic (also important)
3 years ago, this was 20k custom software project.
I'm giving the whole thing away.
Free. Open source. Yours to copy, break, and rebuild.
Not selling anything. Not gating it behind an email list: github.com/famecodeteam/hack…
1
7
758
Running a remote business is challenging, but @raylo offers a reliable way to get team tech and ensure they feel valued from day one.
You keep your capital for growth.
Check out the options for your team here: mdsh.io/raylo-business
1
4
173