Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Canva got its first customers? Fusion Books, which was Canva’s predecessor, was Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht’s initiative to assist schools in creating yearbooks of better quality for the learners. Perkins made some extra cash during her studies giving other students lessons about design. She realized their need for an easy-to-use graphic …
Category Archives: SaaS
How WordPress got its first users?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How WordPress got its first users? WordPress started as a tool for creating blogs. It was built on the code of B2/cafelog, a popular, yet simple blogging tool. B2/cafelog went down without any explanation from its creator.Matt and Michel’s posts about WordPress on b2/cafelog website.One of the B2/cafelog’s users, Matt Mullenweg, decided to …
How Zoom got its first users?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Zoom got its first users? Zoom was founded by Eric Yuan, a former WebEx worker at Cisco, which was a platform for video conferences.Customers of the company were unhappy with the service quality. Yuan left Cisco together with about 40 other employees and had a plan for his own startup.He raised around …
How Stripe got its first users?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Stripe got its first users? Stripe was born to make payment easier for developers. Other payment services, such as PayPal, didn’t focus that much on developers.Patrick Collison knew Paul Graham from Y Combinator. Collison’s previous project, Auctomatic (an online auction management system), was built thanks to YC.Before Paul and his brother, John, …
How Notion got its first users?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Notion got its first users? Ivan Zhao and Simon Last iterated a few times before coming up with the appropriate version of Notion.Their first, no-code version of the app, kept crashing and died after 2 years.Later, Ivan asked his mother to lend him $150,000 to fund Notion 1.0. It was an all-in-one …
How Gumroad got its first users?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Gumroad got its first users? Sahil Lavingia, a teenager from Palo Alto has designed a few apps before. They weren’t successful. Soon, he started playing around with Photoshop. He made a pencil icon for another app.He didn’t finish that app. He thought that he could still make money on the icon because …
How Ahrefs got its first customers?
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Ahrefs got its first customers? The founder, Dmytro Gerasymenko, set up his first simple online database of links when he was still at school, but he lost all of that due to a server crash. He didn’t back up.He started it all over again after a few years. Site Audit was Ahrefs’ …
How Zapier got its first users
Unicorn WarriorBrainiac How Zapier got its first users? Zapier Beta was full of bugs. The initial prototype was built within 54 hours at Startup Weekend in Columbia.Wade Foster, Bryan Helming, and Mike Knoop needed people to test their software and give them feedback. Foster went to online tech forums and looked for people interested in …
