How 290 foundersgrew their MRR.
A year of founders’ own revenue posts, read one by one. What got them customers, what grew them, and what didn’t work.
Three numbers.The short version.
of founders who named a failure named paid ads.
who raised prices called it a win.
a month is where the stuck ones stalled.
Under $10k, communities.Past $10k, outreach.
About a third of smaller founders found their first customers in Reddit, forums or Discord. Past $10k a month, only 8% did. A third wrote to people directly instead.
209 founders said where their first customers came from.
Each reply became a potential demo.A founder at €10K MRR, on messaging hundreds of people on LinkedIn. Read the post
It holds within B2B. Communities fall from 39% to 8%, outreach rises from 13% to 42%.
Paid ads failed most.Content grew them.
Half the founders named something that didn’t work, and paid ads led by a distance: 36% of founders under $10k named them, against 14% past $10k. Asked for the one thing that mattered most, they named content and a better product.
What didn’t work · 144 said
What grew them · 260 said
Raise the price.19 of 20 said it worked.
25 founders raised their prices. 20 said what happened next: better conversion, more serious customers, lower churn. The other one said growth slowed while profit rose.
No increase in churn, much better unit economics.
Read the postNo churn, then a $149 tier that 40% of new signups chose.
Read the postLost 40% of users. Revenue up 35%, churn down from 9% to 3%.
Read the postAverage price at $191k a month, with better cost per acquisition.
Read the postMost got stuck before $2,000.A new channel rarely fixed it.
44 founders said they plateaued. Of the 37 who gave a number, the median was $1,000 a month and 23 stalled at $2,000 or less. What got them moving was usually the product or the offer.
Changed only the onboarding and paywall. One week.
Read the postRebuilt a complicated product as a simple chat, then moved to subscriptions.
Read the postOne positioning session: the headline changed from features to the outcome.
Read the postShipped improvements in a quiet month, then showed them in a 30-second video.
Read the postHow we did it.
A year of posts (1 Oct 2025 to 21 Sep 2026) from 12 founder subreddits. 2,627 posts, 603 with a revenue figure. A model kept the 290 where a founder sincerely reported their own monthly revenue, from 225 people, then read them again for failures, pricing and plateaus. We checked samples by hand, and the price-rise outcomes one by one.
- Self-reported. People post when things go well.
- Drawn from Reddit, so Reddit is overrepresented.
- Some $10k+ outreach stories come from outreach-tool companies.
- Shows what founders did, not what caused their growth.
Use the data. 290 rows, every one linked to its post.
No usernames. Free under CC BY 4.0, with a link back.
Most of them startedwhere buyers were already asking.
Kasspian finds the rooms your buyers are already posting in, tells you which ones will let you speak, and writes the reply.
Find yours